 Governor Matt Bevan's announcement last week about his plans to change Kentucky's state employee pension plan to a 401k plan has many concerned. Chief among those are school districts fearful of a mass exodus of teachers who may retire early in order to get their full pension. In my opinion if this passes it will be the worst thing that happens to education in anyone's lifetime in the state of Kentucky. Jenkins Independent Schools Superintendent Mike Jenton said the plan would be catastrophic to his district and others like it. It's going to make it much harder to recruit quality candidates and as everybody knows in eastern Kentucky it's already difficult to recruit quality candidates anyway and this is going to make it even more difficult. It's going to put a little more financial burden on us whenever we go to the defined contribution plan because some of that money 2% is coming out of the district's funding to match those employees defined contributions. Here at Jenkins if all of our staff was on a defined contribution plan it would be an extra $60,000 to $100,000 out of our coffers every year that right now we're using to pay for employees, we're using to pay for personnel. Bevan has said the new plan would not affect current state employees who have paid into the current pension plan and would only affect new incoming hires. Critics disagree and with the bill and the plan still being drafted many are waiting to see how they will ultimately be affected Jenkins Independent Schools included. This contract is a promise to the workers of the state of Kentucky and now we're going back against that promise and we're starting to try and renegotiate the contract with everyone and to me that's not fair. Everyone who's got the time in to retire will retire because if they stay till after June 30th of 2023 they will be losing money in their pension so you will see a mass exit to some people who can retire. It's easy to dedicate your life to your own children but it's much more of a sacrifice to dedicate your life to other people's children and most people did that with the knowledge that whenever they retired they would be guaranteed a good solid pension and they would be taken care of basically for the rest of their life. Kentucky's pension debt currently sits at more than $37 billion. In Jenkins, Chris Anderson, EKB News.