By Emmarie
Huetteman JUNE 18, 2018
As
teacher strikes flared this spring in more than half a dozen states, from West
Virginia to Arizona, protesters bemoaned stagnant salaries, overcrowded
classrooms and a lack of basic supplies like textbooks and computers.
But
often missing from hand-scrawled placards and fiery speeches was an issue that
has contributed greatly to the financial woes of America’s schools:
skyrocketing health care costs.
Many
teachers, like other public employees, have traditionally accepted a trade-off:
In exchange for relatively low salaries, they could expect relatively generous
benefits, including pensions and low- or no-cost health premiums.
But in
an era of $100,000-a-year drugs and government budget cuts, school districts
are struggling to find the money to keep up their end of the bargain, forced to
take away from classroom funding and even modest, cost-of-living raises. Many
cash-strapped school boards, cities and legislatures view health care benefits
as an unpredictable budget-buster.
Meanwhile,
teachers are being asked to fork over more of their paychecks to keep their
health coverage, even as budget cuts have impelled them to use their own money
for classroom supplies and to crowdsource money to buy computers.
In
Jersey City, N.J., where health care expenses have gone up an average of 10
percent annually as district funding has remained flat, teachers staged a
one-day strike in March to protest rising costs.
But
with an underfunded school system and a $110 million health care bill that is
expected to increase another 13 percent this year, teachers and officials
accepted a mutually imperfect solution that included changes to their health
care plan to end the strike and avoid cuts that would have gutted local
schools.
“We’re
talking about 300 teachers being laid off to be able to afford our health care
bill,” said Sudhan Thomas, president of the Jersey City Public Schools’ board
of education.
While
the teacher strikes have ebbed with the school year, deals brokered to end
walkouts mostly offered temporary fixes, with no long-term solution in sight.
Proposed
cuts to health benefits in West Virginia were also behind the first strike this
year, shuttering the state’s public schools for nine days and inspiring similar
protests in several states. When officials initially extended teachers a 1
percent pay raise, small in comparison to an imminent hike in their health
insurance contributions, teachers rejected the offer.
“You
really know you have arrived when you become a verb,” said David Haney,
executive director of the West Virginia Education Association, whose wife is a
teacher. “Don’t make me go West Virginia on you.”
A Pay
Equation That Doesn’t Add Up
Teacher
pay was below the national average of $59,660 in the six states that saw
significant demonstrations this year — West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona,
Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina. But teachers are losing ground
nationally.
The
average teacher salary in the United States has decreased by 4 percent since
2009, adjusted for inflation, according to a report released
in April by the National Education Association, an advocacy group for public
school teachers. During that time, public schools have seen their revenue
shrink, with federal funding dropping 19.5 percent, particularly after
Congress’ across-the-board spending cuts known as budget sequestration took
effect in 2013.
As
funding has declined, the cost of health insurance has gone up. State and local
governments paid 14.5 percent more last year to cover a primary, secondary
or special education teacher and her or his family than they did in 2008, adjusted for inflation.
According
to that data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in March 2017, family
coverage for one teacher cost state and local governments an average of
$1,010.85 per month.
Put
another way, a 2015 report from
the George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Initiative estimated that it
cost about $550 per pupil to cover American teachers’ insurance expenses.
Educators
have also felt the sting of growing health insurance costs, especially as
officials have shifted some of the burden to them. Primary, secondary and
special education teachers paid 25.4 percent more last year to insure themselves and their
families than they did in 2008, according to BLS data adjusted for
inflation.
Teachers
paid an average of $585.71 per month — more than $7,000 annually — in premiums
for family health insurance coverage in March 2017.
For
early-career teachers, that price is especially unmanageable. In Pueblo, Colo.
— where teachers secured raises and an additional $50 a month toward health
insurance premiums after walking out in May — a new teacher makes $35,277,
according to Suzanne Ethredge, president of the Pueblo Education Association.
And
even where school systems offer teachers generous plans, with low deductibles
and minimal premium contributions, the educators frequently have to pick up the
costs for family members.
Many
States, Common Themes
The
standoff in West Virginia typified the strains in states grappling with rising
benefit costs on budgets strained by tax cuts and the recession.
Teachers,
like other West Virginia public employees, pay for insurance based on what they
earn. For a plan that allows some choice of doctors and hospitals, that means
$59 per month for someone making less than $20,000, but $164 per month for
someone making more than $125,000.
Last
fall, the Public Employees Insurance Agency floated the ideas of
slashing the number of salary tiers used to calculate contributions, adding
spouses’ salaries in those calculations and charging per person for family
coverage rather than a flat fee.
The
agency further announced that state employees would soon be required to use a
wellness app called Go365, incurring penalties for failing to meet their health
goals or for declining to use the system altogether.
So when
state lawmakers proposed a mere 1 percent raise to an average salary of just
$45,555, teachers pushed back. They refused to return to work until officials
agreed to a 5 percent raise, scuttled the Go365 plan and delayed the health
care hikes so a task force could review them.
In
Oklahoma, the strikers publicly focused their complaints on operational costs
like textbooks and salaries. They secured roughly an extra half a billion
dollars, said Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association.
“We got everything that we could out of legislators this year,” she said.
But
Priest said health care costs remain a serious issue for school personnel.
While the state covers teachers’ individual premiums, covering a spouse and
children can cost an additional $1,200 per month, she said — a significant
portion of a teacher’s starting salary.
She
said that some teacher aides work only for the health insurance for their
families — in some cases writing a check to the district to cover the
difference between meager salaries and their premiums.
While
the advent of summer break has calmed the protests, future strikes look likely,
said Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and
former Massachusetts secretary of education. The fact that most teachers
negotiated at least some concessions proved the tactic effective enough,
especially as health care costs continue to rise.
“The
shoe is pinching,” he said, “and people are reacting.”
Emmarie Huetteman: ehuetteman@kff.org, @emmarieDC
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