Kentucky's public schools run on roughly 40,000 classroom teachers, and the state's own numbers put the full certified workforce higher still: the Kentucky Department of Education's education facts page counts more than 43,000 full-time equivalent educators holding Kentucky-issued certification. Every one of those certificates sits on a five year renewal cycle, which means that in any given year, something like one in five of Kentucky's educators is inside a renewal window whether they are thinking about it or not. Layer on a second clock that never pauses: under KRS 156.101, the Effective Instructional Leadership Act, every principal, assistant principal, supervisor of instruction, and other administratively certified leader in the Commonwealth owes 21 hours of approved leadership training every single year, a requirement first written into law in the 1980s and reaffirmed, with sharper teeth, by the General Assembly as recently as the 2026 session.
Kentucky's educators are engaged with this system at a scale most states would envy. The 2025-2026 Impact Kentucky Working Conditions Survey drew responses from 40,462 educators, which KDE reports as 84.7 percent of all certified educators employed in the state's public schools. But engagement with the profession and clarity about its paperwork are two different things, and in my work facilitating professional development for educators across all 50 states, Kentucky is one of the states where I hear the most confusion about who owes what, to whom, and by when. The confusion is understandable, because the agencies, systems, and program names that governed Kentucky certification for two decades have almost all changed in the last eight years.
This article is my attempt to put the current picture in one place: how the five year renewal actually works for teachers, how the annual EILA requirement actually works for leaders, what changed in Frankfort that your older colleagues may not have heard about, and how to build a calendar that keeps both clocks quiet. As always, the regulations and the Kentucky Department of Education are the authorities here. I will point you to the primary sources as we go, and you should confirm anything consequential against them or against KDE's Office of Educator Licensure and Effectiveness before you act.
First, the landscape changed. Your mental map may be out of date.
If you earned your Kentucky certificate before 2018, the system you remember was run by the Education Professional Standards Board as a freestanding agency, new teachers proved themselves through the Kentucky Teacher Internship Program, and your evaluation lived inside the statewide Professional Growth and Effectiveness System. All three of those landmarks have moved.
The EPSB no longer operates as an independent agency. Following a 2018 reorganization, its functions were brought under the Kentucky Department of Education, and the day to day work of issuing and renewing certificates now runs through KDE's Office of Educator Licensure and Effectiveness in Frankfort. The board itself still exists inside that structure and still holds the statutory authority that matters most to this article, including the authority to revoke the certificate of an instructional leader who persistently fails to complete required training. But when you have a certification question in 2026, you are dealing with KDE, and the front door is the Kentucky Educator Certification System, KECS, the online portal where applications, renewals, and payments now live.
KTIP is a similar story. The General Assembly stopped funding the internship program in the 2018 budget, and the program was suspended from that point forward. Senate Bill 265 in 2024 finished the job, removing KTIP from the statutes and directing that certification be awarded on completion of an approved preparation program and the required assessments. In its place, districts are now responsible for providing induction and mentoring for first year teachers, with standards and guidance developed through the EPSB. And the statewide PGES evaluation framework of the mid-2010s has given way to locally developed certified evaluation plans, adopted district by district under KRS 156.557 and its implementing regulation.
I rehearse this history for a practical reason. A great deal of the certification advice circulating in Kentucky schools, on older blog posts, and in the institutional memory of veteran colleagues describes agencies and programs that no longer exist in the form described. If a checklist tells you to mail something to the EPSB as a standalone agency, or to plan your first renewal around a KTIP committee, the checklist predates the current system. Start from KECS and the KDE licensure office, and you will be starting from the map as it is actually drawn.
The five year renewal, in plain terms
Kentucky professional certificates are issued for five year terms. When your term ends, you renew through KECS by completing the renewal application, the form historically known as the CA-2, and you qualify for renewal by meeting one of two conditions. Either you completed three years of classroom teaching during the five year life of the certificate, or you completed six semester hours of additional graduate credit. That is the core of it, and for a full time teacher who has simply been teaching, the experience route means renewal is mostly an administrative exercise: your district verifies your experience, you complete the character and fitness questions, you pay the fee, and you submit.
The graduate credit route exists for everyone the experience route does not fit. If you stepped away from the classroom, worked part time, or spent part of the five years outside a certified position, six semester hours of graduate credit completed during the period keeps the certificate alive. This is worth planning rather than discovering. Three years into a certificate term is the right moment to ask whether you are on pace to meet the experience condition, because it leaves you two full years to pick up coursework if you are not. Discovering the gap in the spring your certificate expires is how educators end up teaching on emergency provisions in August.
Kentucky also maintains two safety valves that educators should know exist even if they never use them. There is a one time exception renewal available to educators who held Rank I or Rank II status with at least three years of teaching experience before the certificate expired, which allows a single renewal without the usual conditions. And retired educators can obtain an emeritus certificate, a ten year certificate issued at reduced cost and renewable once, which is how many of Kentucky's retired teachers keep the door open for substitute and part time work. Both are handled through the same KDE licensure office, and both have documentation requirements you should confirm directly with that office.
A word about ranks, because they are the part of Kentucky's system that most confuses educators arriving from other states. Kentucky classifies certified staff into ranks that drive the salary schedule: Rank III for a bachelor's degree, Rank II for an approved master's degree, and Rank I for the master's plus 30 additional approved graduate hours or the equivalent. Rank advancement is not a renewal requirement. It is a compensation decision, and for most teachers a significant one, since districts pay meaningfully more at each rank. The reason to keep ranks in mind while thinking about renewal is efficiency: graduate coursework you complete toward a rank change is also graduate coursework, which means a teacher working toward Rank II is simultaneously satisfying the renewal condition without any extra effort. If you are going to invest in credits anyway, invest them where they count twice.
EILA hours: the requirement that never takes a year off
Teachers think in five year cycles. Kentucky's school leaders do not have that luxury, because the Effective Instructional Leadership Act runs on an annual clock. KRS 156.101 requires each instructional leader to complete an intensive training program approved by the Kentucky Board of Education totaling no fewer than 21 participant hours every year. The implementing regulation, 704 KAR 3:325, supplies the operating details, and both are short enough that every administrator in the state should read them once in full.
Start with who is covered, because the statute's definition is broader than most people assume. An instructional leader is an employee of the public schools serving as a principal, assistant principal, supervisor of instruction, guidance counselor, director of special education, or any other administrative position deemed to require an administrative certificate. Read that list again. Guidance counselors are in it. Directors of special education are in it. EILA is routinely described as a principal requirement, and principals are certainly its center of gravity, but the obligation follows the certificate and the position, not the title on the office door. If you moved from the classroom into any administratively certified role, the 21 hour clock started with the move.
The regulation adds a threshold that matters for people who change roles midyear: the requirement applies to a certified instructional leader employed in the same position for 100 or more days during the school year. It also shapes what counts toward the 21 hours. Training must be approved for EILA credit, and providers earn that approval by application to KDE, which reviews program content, instructional processes, and impact on participants. Education conferences can contribute, but only up to six hours per school year, a cap that surprises administrators who assumed a three day conference would retire the whole obligation. It will not. The remaining hours have to come from approved programs, and the regulation permits a modest carryover: excess hours earned during the window of June 1 through June 30, up to twelve of them, may be credited toward the following school year's requirement.
The compliance mechanics are unforgiving in their simplicity. Verification of attendance must reach your district's professional development coordinator by June 30 each year. Districts report leaders who have not completed the requirement, and under the statute as amended in 2026, a superintendent must annually report to KDE any instructional leader who fails to complete the training, at which point the leader is placed on probation for one year. If the missing hours for the prior year and the current year are not both completed during that probationary year, KDE forwards the case to the Education Professional Standards Board, which is directed to revoke the instructional leader's certificate. Revocation for missed professional development hours is a severe outcome, and it is precisely the kind of outcome that never needs to happen to anyone reading this article, because 21 hours is a manageable number for a leader who plans it and an impossible one only for a leader who forgets it.
What the 2026 General Assembly just changed
Kentucky's 2026 legislative session produced Senate Bill 4, enacted as an emergency measure, and it is the most significant update to the EILA framework in years. The bill does two things leaders should know about now.
First, it creates a principal leadership development practicum, a statewide program that will provide new principals within their first four years in the position with structured leadership training. The practicum begins July 1, 2027, for the 2027-2028 school year, opening with a cohort of principals who have less than one year of experience in the role. If you are an aspiring or newly seated principal reading this in 2026, the practicum is on its way to being part of your first years on the job, and the Kentucky Board of Education has been given authority to write the regulations that will govern how it operates.
Second, and elegantly, the bill connects the new program to the old requirement: hours completed by participants in the practicum may be substituted to satisfy the annual 21 hour EILA obligation. New principals will not be running two disconnected compliance tracks. The same legislation is also where the strengthened enforcement language lives, the probation year and the certificate revocation pathway described above. The General Assembly's message in SB 4 reads clearly to me: Kentucky is investing more heavily in leadership development and expecting more reliable completion in return.
One practical note that follows from all this churn. EILA program approvals are now issued on a school year basis. KDE's guidance states that trainings taking place on or after July 1, 2025 receive approval certificates valid for the 2025-2026 school year, and providers must reapply for each subsequent year. For a leader choosing training, the operational takeaway is simple: confirm that the specific offering carries current EILA approval for the school year in which you will complete it, rather than relying on the fact that it was approved at some point in the past. A reputable provider can show you that approval without being asked twice.
A calendar that keeps both clocks quiet
Here is the planning rhythm I recommend to Kentucky educators, built around the deadlines above.
For teachers, the five year cycle rewards one honest checkpoint per year. Each fall, confirm two things in KECS: the expiration date on your certificate, and whether the current year will count toward the three years of teaching experience the renewal requires. At the start of year four, make the go or no go decision on the experience route. If you are on pace, renewal is paperwork and you can spend your professional learning time on whatever makes you a better teacher. If you are not on pace, year four and year five are your window for six graduate hours, and choosing hours that also advance your rank means the same investment raises your salary for the rest of your career. Either way, submit the renewal application early in the expiration year rather than the final month. Licensure offices are busiest exactly when you are.
For leaders, the EILA year should be front loaded. Twenty one hours divided by ten months is barely two hours a month, but hours have a way of evaporating between February and May, and the June 30 verification deadline does not move. Leaders I work with who never think about EILA compliance share one habit: they bank at least half the requirement by winter break. Map your year in August. Count the conference hours you expect, remember the six hour cap, and identify approved programs for the balance. Keep your own file of completion certificates rather than assuming the provider or the district will reconstruct your record in June, because when verification is due, the burden of proof is functionally yours. And if you finish the year with momentum, remember the June carryover provision, which lets up to twelve hours earned in that final month count toward next year.
For both groups, one shared rule: documentation is the difference between a requirement you met and a requirement you can prove you met. Kentucky's system runs on verified records, district PD coordinators, KECS entries, transcripts, and completion certificates with hours stated on them. Every course you take should end with a document you could hand to an auditor without explanation. If a learning experience cannot give you that document, it may still make you better at your job, but it will not help you on June 30.
Where iTeachAI Academy fits for Kentucky educators
I built iTeachAI Academy around the conviction that professional learning should respect both an educator's time and an educator's paperwork, and Kentucky is a state where we have done the paperwork deliberately. Our Kentucky leadership courses are EILA approved through the Kentucky Department of Education's EILA program, which means the hours our leadership track delivers are hours a Kentucky principal, assistant principal, or other instructional leader can count toward the annual 21, with the current year approval a leader should always confirm before enrolling in anything, ours included.
The design is the same across everything we offer. Courses are 25 dollars each, self paced so a leader can bank hours in October rather than panic in June, and every completion produces a certificate with documented hours, the artifact your PD coordinator actually needs. Teachers working toward their five year renewal will find courses built for classroom practice, including the AI fluency work that I believe belongs in every educator's next five years, and leaders will find an EILA approved leadership track built for the realities described in this article. The full Kentucky catalog is at classes.iteachai.co/state/ky.
Two clocks, one habit
Kentucky asks its teachers to prove their standing every five years and asks its leaders to sharpen their craft every single year, and after reading the statutes closely, I think the state has the emphasis right. The five year renewal protects the floor of the profession. The annual EILA requirement, especially in its post-2026 form, invests in its ceiling, on the theory the research has supported for decades, that the quality of a school rarely rises above the quality of its leadership.
Neither clock needs to produce anxiety. Both are satisfied by the same habit: know your dates, choose learning that counts, and keep the certificate that proves it. The educators who struggle with Kentucky's requirements are almost never the ones who found them too demanding. They are the ones who found out about them too late. You now know both clocks, which means the only remaining question is what you will learn while they run.
Janette Camacho, Ed.D., is the founder of iTeachAI Academy, a Google for Education Certified Trainer and Coach, FETC 2024/2025/2026 Featured Presenter, Adobe Creative Educator, Apple Teacher, and EdTech Digest 2026 Honoree. With 28+ years of K-12 classroom experience, she has facilitated AI professional development for educators across all 50 states.