The proposed budget cuts for education in Kentucky are precipitating a disastrous situation for our state's young people, and for the teachers and supporting staff who work to prepare our youth for the future. Gov. Ernie Fletcher seeks to cut health care benefits for Kentucky's educators - teachers who have had no significant pay increase since the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 - while the cost of health care insurance and the cost of living in general continue to soar.

Each year, higher standards and a harder workload are expected of Kentucky's teachers, professionals who already work far more hours than what the public might perceive as a seven-hour day. I am often at my classroom desk or at home late into the afternoon or evening completing the essential duties of a typical high school teacher: grading papers, planning lessons, preparing materials, contacting parents. The small increase I receive at the beginning of each school year is hardly noticeable and certainly does not keep up with the rise in the cost of the basic necessities of life.

Is it unreasonable for educators to expect to be fairly compensated for their efforts? Is it just to crush the professionals who truly do care for our children and serve to educate them by heaping upon them more work with not only low pay but now inadequate health care coverage as well?

The disaster lies not only in the absurdity of expecting people to perform at such high standards without proper compensation, but also in the inevitability of driving away our best and brightest young people from teaching. Why pursue a career as a teacher when the hours are insanely long, the pay is depressingly low and the benefits are few? And if Fletcher's budget cuts are passed, they will be even fewer.

Most of us who teach do so because we love it - we care about our students, and we willingly dedicate ourselves to helping them achieve and realize their potential in life. But we are human beings, not martyrs.

We have the right to aspire to the same American dream everyone in this country shares - but more and more is taken from us each year. We need the resources to provide our children with a good education, and we demand the respect that is due to people of all professions.

If Kentucky's parents want a "world-class education" for their daughters and sons, remember the people in the trenches, striving not only to teach their children but floundering in the very bureaucracy that should be supporting them.

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Donna Dawson is an English teacher at Ryle High School in Union, Ky.

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