Live updates: School board considering changes to teacher health benefits

Aug. 28--Hamilton County school board members will vote on the changes at a meeting that starts at 5 p.m. today. Tim Omarzu will be tweeting reports from the meeting.

Earlier report:

In 33 years of teaching, Jenni Oliver had never written a letter to the school board -- until Wednesday.

Oliver shared her pain and upset over proposed cuts to Hamilton County Schools employees' health benefits. Board members will vote on the changes at a meeting that starts at 5 p.m. today.

"What is this saying to them? You are not important, you are not valued, you will take what is given to you," Oliver, an assistant principal at East Hamilton Middle-High School, said in her letter to the board. "In a time when we are asking our teachers to do so much more with so little, they are now being asked to take, in essence, a pay cut."

The board will weigh three options at its meeting tonight:

Under option one, school employees will pay $100 more out-of-pocket each month to keep a spouse insured.

Under option two, spouses will be denied school insurance -- provided the spouses can get insurance through their nonschool job -- and everyone's prescription co-pays would increase. Both options would save the district an estimated $5 million a year.

The third option, a high-deductible plan with a pre-tax health savings account, could save the district as much as $12.7 million -- but would be an abrupt departure from the current plan. A family would pay a $5,000 deductible under option three.

"I've had a lot of angst about it, having been a teacher," District 7 school board member Donna Horn said. "I don't really have a sense how everybody's going to vote."

Horn, who represents the East Hamilton area, sought teachers' input on which option they preferred. She said Wednesday she had gotten close to 90 replies.

"I'm thinking that option one may be my preferred option," Horn said. "I'm basing that on the information that I've gotten from the teachers in my district."

Option one would affect the fewest employees, School Superintendent Rick Smith said, since 1,700 of the district's 4,678 employees have a spouse on the plan, and only those 1,700 employees would have to pay. Option two would affect just about everyone, he said, since most people get prescriptions of one sort or another.

The school district's health insurance covers about 10,000 people, Smith said, when spouses and children are added in.

"Until this year, we've had to raise health insurance premiums twice in the past 12 years," he said.

Employees' monthly premiums went from $25 a month to $100 in the 2010-11 school year, Smith said. In the 2012-13 school year, he said, the cost for dependents increased by $75 a month.

The district spends $50 million annually on health care, health care consultant Ed Adams said, and that's estimated to increase to $53.3 million in 2015, if nothing's done.

Hamilton County Education Association President Sandy Hughes doesn't think the district could legally choose option three, since the high-deductible plan isn't as good as what's offered to state employees.

"These big-deductible plans, I think that's a violation of state law," Hughes said. "Our plan has to be at least as good as the state insurance plan."

This will mark the first time since 1978 that the school district has changed employees' health insurance plans outside of a collective bargaining agreement.

"This came pretty much out of nowhere," Hughes said of the proposed cuts.

Under statewide changes adopted in 2011 in Tennessee, local school boards don't have to enter agreements with teachers. Hamilton County hasn't been affected until now, because the school district reached a three-year contract in 2011 with teachers that just expired July 1.

Even without a contract, teachers should have a place at the negotiation table to "collaboratively conference," Hughes said, under the state law that did away with teachers' collective bargaining rights.

Smith said the district has to decide in time for employees to participate in an open enrollment period in October. Teachers didn't have a representative on the committee considering cuts, because there's no contract.

"There's no union right now," he said. "That's the problem. Who do you include?"

Horn said board members weren't on the committee of four school administrators and the district's consultant, Adams, that analyzed ways to cut health care costs. Too many people on the committee would have made it unwieldy, she said.

"We just have to finalize this," Horn said. "And I'm hoping we can do it."

Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at [email protected] or www.facebook.com/tim.omarzu or twitter.com/TimOmarzu or 423-757-6651.

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