Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed (R-TN-28) Tennessee State Senator Joey Hensley to the newsmaker line to talk about the big issues in Tennessee’s 2023 General Assembly agenda.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line now, a very good friend, State Senator Joey Hensley. Good morning, Senator Hensley.
Hensley: Good morning Michael. How are you this morning?
Leahy: Doing great. Got the Tennessee General Assembly coming back to convene tomorrow. What do you have in store for us?
Hensley: It convenes tomorrow at 12:00 pm, so we will be looking at a lot of issues, education, infrastructure improvements, and abortion issues. There are just a lot of issues coming up, big issues.
Leahy: You represent a tiny sliver of Williamson County. I live in that tiny sliver.
Hensley: Oh you do?
Leahy: I do, yeah.
Hensley: Good. (Chuckles)Â
Leahy: You are my state senator.
Hensley: That’s an honor to represent you, Michael. Yes, I represent Spring Hill in Williamson County.
Leahy: And what other areas do you represent?
Hensley: Maury County, Giles County, Marshall county, and Lewis County.
Leahy: You’re from Lewis County, aren’t you? Which county?
Hensley: Lewis county, where I live. Hohenwald.
Leahy: Hohenwald. What a great name. Where did that name come from by the way?
Hensley: That’s German for high forest.
Leahy: I didn’t know that.
Hensley: It was settled by the Swiss and German. And Hohenwald is a German word. It means high forest.
Leahy: I have learned something new today. Thank you so much for that.
Hensley: (Chuckles) You’re welcome.
Leahy: You’ve been in the state Senate for how long?
Hensley: 10 years.
Leahy: This session there are, what is it? 33 members of the state Senate. 27 Republicans and six Democrats. Is that the breakdown?
Hensley: That’s correct, that’s the breakdown. What is your number one priority Senate Senator Hensley, for this session of the Tennessee General Assembly?
Hensley: I serve on the Education Committee, the Health Committee, and the Finance Committee, and education issues are probably the biggest thing we’re dealing with, trying to improve our reading scores in the third grade. That’s a big issue this year.
And dealing with the governor’s new infrastructure plan will be a big issue. And we certainly need improvement in our highways across the state. And you live in Spring Hill and I go through Spring Hill. We see that issue with the traffic. That’s going to be one of the biggest issues this year.
Leahy: The infrastructure plan, I heard that Governor Lee went down to Dallas recently to take a look at what they’ve done. And he’s looking at, as part of the infrastructure plan, adding some toll lanes.
Hensley: “Choice Lanes,” as he calls them. But it would be adding more lanes and not converting any of the lanes we have. But we would be a public-private partnership of other people, build lanes. That would be a choice or people would have a choice.
And I’m certainly going to look at his plan and listen to it. I’m not sold on choice lanes or certainly toll roads, I’m not for that at all. But these would be extra roads that people always had a choice where they could take another public road if they choose to or if they wanted to get somewhere faster, they could take the toll road.
But we are looking at that. That’s just one issue about funding for congestion and looking at the increase in the fees that owners of electric vehicles pay now, they pay $100 a year looking at probably increasing that sum.
So we do have an issue with our roads and congestion in certain areas. Certainly, Nashville and Spring Hill are prime examples of the growth, around the area. It’s just an issue now and getting worse in the future.
Leahy: Are you familiar with any metropolitan areas where they have successfully implemented what the governor calls choice lanes?
Hensley: They have something similar in different areas of Florida and I think Texas, but personally, I’m not familiar with those. I think that’s something that we will be looking at in depth, certainly, and serving on the Finance Committee.
I look to being involved in that as well as people on the Transportation Committee. But the congestion across the state is a big issue, and we need to talk about it, look at it and see what’re the best options to fund it.
Leahy: In education, you talked about the performance of students being proficient at third-grade levels. Not what we want, actually pretty bad.
Hensley: Exactly.
Leahy: Are there any proposals that you’ve seen in there that make sense to you?
Hensley: We passed a bill last year that’s been implemented this year about retaining third graders if they don’t make a sufficient score on the TCAP and would hold them back if they don’t score proficiently on the test.
And there’s been a lot of discussion about that law that goes into effect this year, but we put into place a lot of ways to help the students. Even if they don’t score proficiently, they can take a summer class or a tutor during the fourth grade and still be passed on.
A lot of people are saying, well, we’re going to hold back two-thirds of the students, but that’s just not true. All we’re trying to do is get our third-grade students to read proficiently. Because now across the state, only about a third of those students are reading on grade level.
And if they’re not reading proficiently in the third grade, then they’re going to have trouble in their other years. So that’s one big issue. We passed that bill last year, and there may be some tweaks to it, but I support the bill because we have to do something to get our students reading better.
Leahy: Yes, and that is a huge problem, isn’t it? The K-12 performance is down across the state. Do you ever look at this and say, all these little things that we’re passing are only going to have a marginal impact? We need something bigger done in K-12 public school education to fix the problem.
Hensley: This was a pretty major deal we passed because now very few students are held back and we implemented other issues to try to help them with the summer school classes four weeks during the summer and tutors in the fourth grade and actually put money into the new funding formula to help pay for those tutors and the state paying for the summer classes.
What we’ve been doing just hasn’t helped even though we did institute phonics a couple of years ago. The teacher uses phonics, which I think is a better method. But we’re actually seeing the third graders, a third of them reading proficiently.
And by the time they get to the 8th grade, it’s even less than that. If a student can’t read proficiently, they’re going to have trouble learning anything else. We’re looking at all these issues, but certainly, the biggest problem is parents not being involved in their child’s education.
But that’s something that the government can’t force, a parent to be involved in their child’s education. And the schools are just left to try to fill that void and unfortunately, sometimes they can do it, and sometimes they can’t.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joey Hensley” by Tennessee General Assembly. Background Photo “Tennessee Senate Chamber” by Tennessee General Assembly.
Optional toll roads= camel’s nose under the tent.
Put in one toll road -optional or not- and sooner or later
politicians will spread tolls to all highways. They just
can’t pass up cash cows.
So does Infrastructure Corporation of America need to have business drummed up for it, courtesy of Tennessee state government and its former CEO, Butch Eley? Crony capitalism at its finest?? Just asking….