by Sarah Ladd, Kentucky Lantern
December 16, 2025

LOUISVILLE — An organization that advocates for Kentucky’s children wants the legislature to fund a kinship care law that’s been stuck in limbo, give guardians ad litem raises, eliminate the sales tax on diapers and much more in 2026. 

Kentucky Youth Advocates released its Blueprint for Kentucky’s Children in early December. This document lays out the organization’s priorities for the 2026 legislative session, which begins Jan. 6. 

During the 60-day session, lawmakers will craft the next two-year state budget. KYA staff want them to take this opportunity to move future JUUL settlement dollars from the state’s general fund to prevention programs. 

Advocates, including a student group and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, have previously urged the General Assembly to move those funds into the Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Program. JUUL, an e-cigarette company, has to pay Kentucky more than $14 million dollars following a lawsuit over marketing practices aimed at youth. The payments are currently going to the state’s general fund. 

Shannon Moody, Kentucky Youth Advocates’ chief officer of strategic initiatives, is optimistic that the JUUL funds will get moved next session since it’s a budget year: “It’s very likely that this year it will get filed and will be successful,” she said. 

Some other legislative priorities in the blueprint include: 

Foster care IDs 

All children in foster care would automatically receive identification cards under this KYA priority, which Moody said would be a “really small budget ask” at “thousands of dollars, not … millions.” 

“We know that youth who are transitioning out of foster care struggle to get access to jobs and housing if they don’t have the proper documentation,” Moody said. “They cannot often access an ID because they don’t have the other supportive documents needed to get an ID, whether it’s a driver’s license or state issued ID.” 

Another concern, Moody said, is the increased risk foster youth face of being trafficked. In 2023, about 67% of the 199 cases that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children handled in Kentucky involved children missing from social services facilities, according to KYA, which is now asking the legislature to require the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to automatically issue IDs to foster youth, at no cost to the children. 

Utility disconnections in extreme weather 

KYA wants the legislature to block utility disconnections during extreme weather events. 

According to the organization, utility disconnections mostly hurt families with young children, low-income households, households of color, households with an individual who relies on electronic medical devices and individuals living in poor conditions.

If Kentucky set a disconnection policy in 2026, it would join 42 others to do so, according to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). 

Abusers in schools  

In 2025, Rep. James Tipton, R-Taylorsville, filed an unsuccessful bill that would have prohibited schools from entering into nondisclosure agreements with a person who behaved inappropriately toward a child and create mechanisms to keep abusers from jumping to another school. 

Kentucky Youth Advocates is pushing for the bill to become law in 2026 and expects to see it filed again. 

“What we see, unfortunately, is … a lot of students are in positions where a small handful of educators or other school employees are grooming them or looking for ways to develop some sort of inappropriate relationship,” Moody said. 

This policy change, she said, would create a mechanism to ensure that if there is an investigation of a school employee around sexual misconduct with a student, that investigation starts and ends and is not interrupted, even if the person resigns.” The bill in 2025 also required schools to share information about substantiated misconduct. 

“It’s really to avoid what people are calling on a national level ‘pass the trash’ — when teachers or other school employees will go from school to school having violated or perpetrated on students. And oftentimes, what we see with sexual misconduct is it’s not just one student, it’s multiple students,” Moody explained. 

More than 70% of child sexual abuse victims do not disclose that abuse occurred within five years of the experience, and 61% of the cases in which Kentucky teachers who lost their licenses between 2016 and 2021 were due to sexual misconduct. 

Other policies 

Even though it’s not outlined as a 2026 priority for Kentucky Youth Advocates, Moody said changes to safety net programs, especially those that will impact kids, need a serious legislative look. For example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act changed work reporting requirements to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program, which removed a previous exemption for foster youth and others.

“I hope that our legislators are going to look at some of the issues that are coming down from the federal level,” Moody said. “We’re thinking defensively about what the SNAP program looks like, what the community eligibility program looks like … and then some of the impacts of Medicaid changes.” 

Read the entire priority document here. 

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.