Bowling Green Daily News letter-to-the editor: 'We can't cut our way to prosperity'

EDITOR'S NOTE: Eldon Renaud, a former president of Bowling Green UAW Local 2164 and longtime union activist, is seeking the Democratic nomination for the 20th House District seat in the May 22 Democratic primary.  

Changes to Kentucky's education funding, pension funding and school safety are front and center in our current legislative session.

On Friday, Western Kentucky University announced cuts due to $27 million cuts and unfunded pension mandates spiraling down from the state. Entire departments may be cut and more than 100 employees will be gone. In Bowling Green, with a large university graduating teachers, these cuts will impact career choices in the field of education.

Kentucky will begin to lose their best and brightest teachers to states with more generous total packages of pay, health care and pensions. While we struggle to attract higher-paying industries and graduate retention, we are denying the most important factor to economic development: great schools and great teachers. Graduates will not apply for jobs in higher education because the layoffs and cuts will force them out of state or to make career changes. As the governor and legislature send these unfunded mandates to local governments and schools at all levels, the prospect of bankruptcies looms. In coal counties, the unmined mineral tax already has those coal dependent schools on the ropes.

Seventeen school districts have been identified as vulnerable to bankruptcy. I suspect these changes will soon bring about lawsuits like the one in 1989, when the Supreme Court required equal funding for schools throughout the state. In 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court declared the state's K-12 school funding formula to be “constitutionally deficient” stating in its decision that “the framers of our constitution intended that each and every child in this state should receive a proper and adequate education, to be provided for by the General Assembly.”

We can’t cut our way to prosperity.

Eldon Renaud