[A]n unprecedented number of teacher and school personnel contracts are timed to expire at the end of June in order to meet federal and state deadlines.
Across the state, school boards and school employees are gearing up or beginning negotiations for fiscal year 2018 knowing that Vermont Education Health Initiative plans, the insurer of school health care plans, will change in the middle of the year, according to Joel Cook, the president and executive director of the Vermont National Education Association.
Cook said the simultaneous expiration of contracts is “beyond unusual.”
“It is unique,” Cook continued. “The only other time we remember a vast majority of contracts being up was in the context of the Great Recession when there were a lot of one-year contracts. Aside from that, there is not a time in our history” when so many would be involved in collective bargaining at once.
Nicole Mace, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, said that her group and others have been advising school districts not to negotiate contracts beyond FY 2018 because the status of health care reform has been in flux for the past few years.
The health care plans offered by most schools triggers a federal excise tax that is part of the Affordable Care Act. The tax was originally supposed to go into effect in January 2018, but was extended until 2020.
Currently, VEHI covers more than 42,000 education employees, retirees and their families. They collect the premiums from the school districts and pay the health care costs for the employees.
The four new plans are similar to what school employees have now but premium costs are lower for school districts, and teachers will pay higher out-of-pocket costs for deductibles and copays.
The plans cover the same services from the same providers, which is acceptable to the union, according to Cook, but he takes issue with out-of-pocket costs.
“None of the plans is as good as the primary plan most people have now,” Cook said.
Cook said individual school boards may step forward and pay the increased out-of-pocket costs, but they could also spend as little as possible on health care and substantially diminish school employees’ overall compensation.
Mace said she expects school boards to help out. “We fully expect that negotiated agreements will involve some employer contribution to offset increased out-of-pocket costs to employees, while achieving savings for Vermonters,” she said.
Taxpayers currently spend more than $214 million a year on health care for schools.
VEHI chose to stick with the January 2018 deadline to transition to the new plans for active employees because that was Green Mountain Care’s timeframe. Laura Soares, who is president and CEO of VEHI, said she hopes all bargaining will be completed by November 2017 so that they can start the administrative work of moving employees over.
This could be a problem, according to Cook, a member of VEHI’s board who tried to get the deadline delayed for an additional year. He said it will test Vermont NEA’s capacity, as well as that of the handful of lawyers who help school boards bargain.
“We haven’t magically created three times the staffing on either side of this situation to meet this compressed timeframe for everybody,” Cook said. “We will do it but it won’t be easy.”
Soares countered that the information school boards and employees need for bargaining has been available since last January. She and Mark Hage, who works for the Vermont NEA, have been criss crossing Vermont providing information about the plans to school leaders.
“Personally, I was hoping people would start bargaining earlier than their normal cycle because these are not normal times,” Soares said.
