Many of our leaders are banking on a "stimulus package" to jump-start the economy, promote employment and ease the burden of our working men and women. I suggest Kentucky begin a stimulus package of its own.

For the past several decades, Kentucky's leaders have tried to lift our commonwealth from poverty, and most agree that education plays a key role in attracting jobs and preparing our young men and women for a lifetime of employment. This is portrayed by the establishment of the Cabinet status for Education and Workforce Development.

My examination of the issues leads me to the following suggestion on how to best achieve the preparation of these young folks for employment and how to attract the actual jobs they may prepare for.

The answer is to prepare all of our students for further education, not just a higher education for some of them.

Each high school graduate should get a $5,000 voucher for books, tuition and fees to any institution within Kentucky that can train them for employment, whether it be college, vocational school or workplace training.

This is not a bank account and cannot be spent on pizza, rent or beer. It is solely for the direct educational expenses meant to further train all of our graduates for future employment and gives them 10 years to use it.

It is a very precise stimulus for education and employment. We must get out of the narrow consideration of higher education for some of our children and expand it to consider further education for all of them. Our C and D students deserve the opportunity to be trained into employability, also.

This plan should inspire lots of students in many poorer counties to consider efforts to continue their education after high school, and it should attract many vocational schools and worker training programs to locate in Kentucky because it would be a target-rich environment for students to train, especially for new and emerging industries. Their books, tuition and fees are covered. This should be a big break for every parent with school-age children.

This is an economic/education stimulus package which will create jobs throughout the state. The beauty of it is that the money is only spent after each of the students makes an internal commitment to train for employability.

This is not money spent on some big building which may or may not attract students. It is a specific expenditure with immediate benefits and it all gets spent in Kentucky where taxes collected from the expenditures get returned to the state in the form of taxes.

Kentucky must consider new methods of training our work force and creating new jobs. This program achieves both aims and we can afford the cost by recommitting money which has been systematically stripped away from our educational budget.

For example, in 1991, 68 percent of the state's budget went to education. This year, it is less than 60 percent.

We must reverse this trend, and we must afford the cost or continue our status of poverty and illiteracy.