Senate Bill 151, “the sewage bill,” was passed in late March of this year, sending Kentucky residents into an uproar.
Why did we care so much about a sewage bill? Why should you care?
It wasn’t a sewage bill. At the last minute, our senators added over 100 pages of pension reform to the bill and passed it without the required three readings.
Aside from the intentional deception by our own elected government, we should care because the pension bill affects all of our lives in a huge way.
Pensions go to government employees when they retire, rather than the traditional retirement plan. This applies to everyone from police officers to waste management workers, but the affected party most relevant to Murray State students is educators.
Murray State has its roots in teaching, as it was originally Murray State Normal School, opened on September 23, 1923. A normal school is a teacher’s college.
Wesley Bolin, a library assistant at Pogue Special Collections Library, said the State Normal School Commission decided western Kentucky needed a teacher’s college because the lakes made it too difficult to travel to other parts of the state.
Calloway County citizens raised money to found the school here and Rainey T. Wells offered up his farm as the place the school would be built.
Murray State was founded because of a lack of teachers in western Kentucky and today, Kentucky citizens face the same problem. The lack of funding for public schools and the pension crisis are driving educators out of state to places where their retirement is more secure.
The future of Kentucky depends on educated youth. We can’t educate students if there is no one to educate them.
Hitting even closer to home, in 2014-15, the Murray State College of Education and Human Services awarded nearly 30 percent of the total degrees awarded that year.
There is a huge population of students at Murray State studying to become teachers. Those who graduate with an education degree may have to leave Kentucky if they want to have a secure retirement.
Even if you do not care about the shortage of elementary, middle and high school teachers in Kentucky, you should care about how the pension crisis affects you as a college student.
Professors also receive a pension. Why would a highly educated and experienced person continue teaching at a university when they may not be guaranteed a retirement?
Unless they deeply care about the education of you and your peers more so than their own wellbeing, they won’t.
A future without educators is a bleak one. In fact, a future without educators is more similar to our past than any sort of futuristic ideal.
Something must be done before Kentucky and states in similar situations are left without a means to be educated.