The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District will reply to a healthcare plan offer made by the teachers and support staff union during negotiations Wednesday night.
Pegge Erkeneff with the school district…
Erkeneff: “This is the biggest hurdle so to get to anything else we have to solve the rising costs of healthcare and how we’re going to be able to do that. So that’s number one right now, is solving the healthcare and then once that is agreed upon, then we’ll be looking at salary and the duration of the contract, how long the contract will be. And there’s some other open items but the big ones have always been healthcare and salary.”
A proposal was submitted by the unions last October proposing all costs above and beyond employees’ out of pocket costs be covered 100 percent by the district, which was found to be unreasonable. Findings from Colleen Savoie, Consultant to the Health Care Program Committee, show the association’s proposed healthcare plan would increase district costs by $1.1 million.
Attorney Saul Friedman, representing the School District, presented a high deductible healthcare plan counter offer including a district costs cap of $1,500 per month/per employee.
The Kenai Peninsula Education Association’s Matt Fischer described the district’s high deductible proposal as an “experiment”, saying there’s no proof the proposal would save the district money.
After deliberating, union negotiators offered a district cap of $1,700 per employee/per month, with employees paying 15 percent of anything over that cap.
Rob Johnson with the Kenai Peninsula Education Support Association…
Johnson: “This is mostly guess work because we don’t have actual experience with this so it was our best guess based on what we could foresee in the future.”
The District also proposes only providing healthcare benefits to employees working at least 30 hours per week. The current threshold is 20 hours, but existing part-time employees will be grandfathered into the plan. The unions asked for a guarantee that the District will not split full-time jobs into two part-time positions in order to avoid paying benefits.
Friedman says the district will consider those and the other sections of the associations’ counter offer and provide a response within one week.