A group of retired teachers joined state Rep. Patti Minter, D-Bowling Green, at Western Kentucky University on Tuesday to oppose Republican Gov. Matt Bevin.

“We are standing up to Matt Bevin and his record of bullying educators and disrespecting working families,” Minter said during the latest stop on the Kentucky Democratic Party’s “Won’t Be Bullied by Bevin Tour.”

During the event in WKU’s Cherry Hall, critics excoriated what they described as Bevin’s disrespect for educators and efforts to slash millions in state public education funding and revise teachers’ pension benefits.

Among them was retired teacher Dave Strode, who most recently taught at Richardsville Elementary School before ending his nearly 27-year teaching career last year.

Teachers are tired of being “bullied” and “belittled,” Strode said.

“Educators are on the front line, working with the most valuable resource that we have in our state, our future: our children,” he said.

Bevin’s opponents held up Attorney General Andy Beshear, a Democrat challenging him during the gubernatorial election next month, as the antidote.

“This is wrong and it’s why we need a governor like Andy Beshear who will put teachers first and strengthen public education,” Minter said.

Davis Paine, Bevin’s campaign manager, responded to a request for comment with the following statement: “Gov. Matt Bevin has committed 100 percent of lottery funds to education, a first for the commonwealth, and today Kentucky is spending more per K-12 pupil than ever before. After eight years of then-Gov. (Steve) Beshear raiding the teachers’ pension fund to the tune of $8 billion in additional debt, Matt Bevin has fully funded the pension system and is committed to continuing to improve public education in Kentucky.”

The political rally with local educators came as teachers in school districts across Kentucky have been receiving anti-Beshear emails sent to their work email accounts.

On Tuesday, Courier Journal education reporter Olivia Krauth tweeted that teachers in the Bowling Green Independent School District received the emails as well, “bringing the total number of districts reporting getting this email to at least 13 since the end of September,” Krauth wrote.

Responding to a request for comment, BGISD Superintendent Gary Fields told the Daily News he hadn’t been contacted by anyone in the district about said emails.

“I do believe that our staff understands that unwanted emails occasionally show up in their in-boxes (spam, sales pitches, phishing scams, political ads, etc.) and they know the best way to combat them is to mark them as spam and to delete them,” Fields wrote.

The Kentucky Education Association asked for a Kentucky Board of Education investigation into the source of the emails, the Courier Journal reported.

In an interview with the Daily News on Tuesday during a stop in Bowling Green, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis addressed the topic.

“I don’t have the legal authority to investigate an individual who uses their personal email account to email public employees,” he said, adding that the state board and the Kentucky Department of Education “neither has, nor should have” that authority.

“That ask is a little bit misplaced,” he said.