The Vermont-National Education Association says school boards have a legal obligation under the “status quo doctrine” to provide health benefits similar in value during what is termed the default period. The union says none of the four new plans offered by the nonprofit Vermont Education Health Initiative is “sufficiently similar” to current plans because most teachers have fixed copay amounts and no other out-of-pocket expenses such as deductibles and coinsurance.
“If a school board hasn’t resolved negotiations and VEHI moves people into the default plan with a substantially lower value and cost and the employer fails to top off the benefit to which the employees are entitled, that will create a likely filing of unfair labor practice charges,” said Joel Cook, the Vermont-NEA’s executive director, in an interview. Such filings are made with Vermont’s Labor Relations Board. If the board finds the school district at fault, the district can be fined.
VEHI covers more than 42,000 school employees, families and retirees. It collects premiums from districts and pays health care bills for employees. VEHI needs school districts to be done enrolling employees in the new plans by Nov. 15, 2017. If districts can’t do that because they are still bargaining, then employees will be automatically moved onto the default plan, which has lower premiums for school districts but higher out-of-pocket costs for teachers. They will have to stay on that plan until the following year when open enrollment occurs.
The union said the timeline is unrealistic. It also said more is at stake during contract negotiations than health care.
“The fact that this manufactured crisis may have center stage does not remove from the stage the dozens of matters besides health insurance that all must be resolved locally between school boards and its employees,” said Darren Allen, the spokesperson for the Vermont-NEA.
Chris Leopold, a lawyer for school boards, said it isn’t clear that having teachers go onto the default plan during bargaining would violate the status quo doctrine, because their current health care plans will have disappeared.
The most popular plans that school employees are on right now have some out-of-pocket costs, but they top out at around $400, according to Leopold. “If on Jan. 1, 2018, a teacher is experiencing costs over and above that ($400), a school district may become liable for those,” he said. But he added that there is an easy fix: “School districts may just need to contribute the same level toward the health care plan and that will satisfy the law.”
Leopold said the NEA is making assumptions that school districts won’t help their teachers. But Cook has said there is no way to know if individual school boards will step up or will look to spend as little as possible on health benefits. “That is the range within which negotiations occur,” he said.
At the annual meeting of the Vermont School Boards Association, school board members were also concerned there isn’t enough capacity in the system to handle the volume of bargaining to be done.
Neil O’Dell chairs Dresden School Board, which is part of a cross-state district serving Norwich and the New Hampshire town of Hanover. O’Dell said most negotiating teams will try to wrap up talks before the end of the school year. He thinks it is likely this will cause a bottleneck in bargaining by next summer since there are so few lawyers, fact finders and mediators available to help.
“Given the complexities associated with a change in available health care plans, it’s possible many of us will need the assistance of a mediator,” O’Dell said. “If we’re competing for the same resources it’s likely to have an impact on timely settlements.” That means the default plans are more likely to go into effect.
Nicole Mace, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, said many boards reached out to their local union representatives in early summer to try to get negotiations started but that the only response they got was the sound of crickets chirping.
Laura Soares, of the Vermont School Boards Insurance Trust, and Mark Hage, of the Vermont-NEA, have been crisscrossing the state making presentations to school employees about the new plans since January. They have met pockets of resistance. In Addison Northwest a flier had been circulated among teachers by the local union representatives advising them not to ask any questions if they attended the voluntary meeting.
Soares said she and Hage have been told by school district business offices that local union leaders were telling people not to attend.
Allen, the union spokesman, responded that some employees feel the information being presented has a bias toward management. “There have been rare instances where that advice has been not to attend (voluntary informational meetings), but in the vast majority of instances, the advice to our members has been it is up to them whether or not to attend,” he said.
Lately, the Vermont-NEA communications with teachers has been setting an adversarial tone toward the school boards association. The union has been frustrated with VEHI over the deadline of January 2018 to switch care and the recent move by VEHI membership to give one of the union’s two seats on the VEHI board to the school boards association. The union has also criticized the VEHI vote in June to change the default plan to one with more out-of-pocket costs, calling it “a serious breach of trust” between school districts and the union.
“The (health care deadline) decision VEHI made was over our objections and was made by three board members representing VSBA’s interests,” Allen said.
The school boards association was not part of the VEHI board until the annual October meeting, when it was granted a seat on the five-person panel. Mace said the VSBA was not part of the deadline decision, the choice of the default plan or the move to reduce the union leadership’s role on the VEHI board.
“The Vermont School Boards Association knows full well that for years Vermont-NEA has warned about the effect health care changes will have on local school boards and local educators,” Allen said. “At every turn, our efforts on the Vermont Education Health Initiative board to mitigate the abruptness of these changes were rebuffed by that board’s majority.”
The union sees the makeup of the VEHI board as one of management versus the union because the other three members had been some combination of a superintendent, school board member or business manager. Those who wanted the change argued that those three positions are practitioners and are not the same as the leadership of an advocacy organization representing a constituency that is part of the negotiations.
The union also depicts the change in the VEHI board configuration as a strike against teachers. “The move means that the 40,000 or so people covered by VEHI health insurance plans have one vote on the five-member board, while school boards, superintendents and business managers hold four,” the union wrote in a recent email to teachers and school employees.
Mace pointed back at the union while saying the VSBA respects teachers as professionals and realizes that health care is very important to them and their families. She said these are challenging and necessary conversations that have to happen in an informed and empathetic way.
“Regrettably, the VT-NEA’s approach so far has relied on fear and adversarial messaging,” she said. “VSBA reached out to the VT-NEA to discuss a proposal that could benefit both employees and taxpayers. Based on the continued negative communications coming from that organization, it seems that they do not have an interest in working together towards such an outcome.”
Soares said this is all part of the game. “The NEA is doing their advocacy job, the school boards are doing their advocacy job — now it is all going to play out over the next year.”
She said she is confident all the contracts will be agreed upon in time to move the employees over to the new plans in November. Ground rules should be set so that if the different sides aren’t lining up by March, then they can get outside help, she said.
Both sides have to decide how much savings they will take from the lower premiums and how much they will share the new out-of-pocket costs, while passing along some savings to taxpayers, she said.
“I think there are ways to run the numbers that it will be a win, win, win and people will settle. We will get there,” said Soares, adding that now is when the “rubber hits the road.”
