Pension debate concerns prospective teachers
Kentucky School Advocate
July/August 2018
By Matt McCarty
Staff writer
As legislators in Frankfort debated changes to the teachers’ pension system in the spring, students in Mercer County Senior High School’s Principles of Teaching class were having their own discussions.
“They’ve asked me, ‘should I even be a teacher? Is there even going to be an opportunity for me?’” said family consumer science teacher Miranda Goodlett, who teaches the class. “They’re just very disappointed, I think. I’ve never seen a set of kids so passionate.”
Kaysie Adkins, left, shows her student-teaching binder to Trinity Yeast, teacher Miranda Goodlett and Julia Weaber
during Goodlett’s Principles of Teaching Class. All three students are juniors at Mercer County Senior High School.
Superintendent Dennis Davis spoke to the class to answer their questions about the pension changes and what it could mean for future teachers.
“They hear so much about sick days. They don’t understand how the retirement system works,” Davis said. “So I went and broke down to them what the retirement system was, what it looks like, what was proposed, how would that affect teachers. … I just tried to put it down to where they understand exactly what they’re going to face as a teacher when they enter the profession.”
Some of the students took it a step further and went to Frankfort to rally with their teachers. Brevin Charles, who graduated this year, was among those. His mom is the guidance counselor at Mercer County Elementary and he said she encourages him to pursue teaching.
“I think that with our education system, something is always going to be changing and there’s always going to be new advantages and disadvantages to teaching,” he said.
Davis said the school allowed the students in the Principles of Teaching class to attend the rally because “it was important for them to see and to understand what teachers were fighting for.”
Loren Hahn, who graduated in the spring, was interested in becoming a special education teacher but has now decided to be an occupational therapist. The pension debate prompted her to do further research about teaching.
She said had it not been for the changes to the teachers’ pension system (now in limbo), “I think I would’ve gone into teaching because I wouldn’t have done that research to realize everything that’s involved with it. But after I did that research I figured out some things I didn’t know about teachers and I didn’t know about all the things that especially special ed teachers have to go through, so that’s really what made me change my course of action.”
Julia Weaber, who will be a senior, also said the pension debates scared her, but teaching is her passion and “there’s nothing that even financially that could stop me from doing that because I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else.”