They start in less than a week for Jefferson County Public Schools.

The new superintendent held two public forums this week to introduce himself and meet more of the community.

As our June Lefler reports, the district is facing unique challenges this year, largely from changes at the federal level.

Details in tonight's Education Matters report.

At Fairdale High School.

The new superintendent makes sure to brag on the Bulldogs.

Fairdale has a program along with Seneca, where juniors get this juniors and senior multilingual servants serve as peer mentors and translators for newcomers to America.

Students who struggle to understand English.

Children helping children.

An immigrant himself, Brian Yearwood's passion for tennis took him around the globe and eventually to the U.S..

I talk a little funny.

I have an accent because I was born in a place called Trinidad and Tobago in the British colonies.

I grew up with a family of educators.

My mom was a kindergarten teacher.

My dad was a math teacher, traveled extensively with my tennis racket, played at Wimbledon to represent the Caribbean area and the Latin American countries, and that took me forward to get my education.

Yearwood takes questions at a forum attended largely by JCPs staff and parents.

This mom is eager to get her child into one of the sought after magnet or traditional schools.

Your elementary school system is quite robust.

Did you have a good elementary schools?

But then the ball MCPs there's a middle school with high schools because then you have to apply to get into these Steam or Stem academies or these gifted and talented programs.

We do not have the capacity for everyone to be there.

Long term.

What my dream and my hope is, is that every middle school gets to the level where it becomes difficult to discern.

This one is gifted.

This one is regular.

What's unique this year is federal funding cuts, the time frame for budget, for balancing a $100 million budget deficit.

That's a good question.

The end of pandemic relief dollars set the district back $100 million, and other federal funding is not guaranteed.

One thing that we cannot sacrifice is the quality of the instructional environment in our schools.

So we will have to make sure all of our resources are put into the teaching and learning environment.

So again, it's somewhat of unknown territory.

It is.

But we have to prepare ourselves for the worst, which means that we have to be better, more excellent stewards of our taxpayers dollars and make sure that they're going into the areas to provide that quality instruction.

With increased immigration enforcement, this community organizer worries for Latino kids who make up nearly 1 in 5 JCPs students.

A lot of our students are now unaccompanied youth.

We have families that are being separated, and now we are going to see an increasing homelessness.

So yes, really to engage with organizations like yours, because if a child is not in school and it's that missing out on the educational opportunities, they will find alternative ways to make a living.

We don't need that in our community.

We do not need.

Yearwood will lead the district for the next four years, according to his contract.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Leffler.

Superintendent Brian Yearwood will resume his series of listening sessions after school starts.

Those will run from August 12th to September 4th at high schools across the district.