A $4 million dispute over health insurance is no closer to resolution after St. Paul Public Schools on Friday rejected a proposed “compromise” and threatened to sue the teachers union.
Teachers and teachers aides voted in spring to leave the district’s HealthPartners plan next year, halfway through a two-year contract, triggering a $4 million early termination fee for the district and 22 percent premium hikes for the district’s other 1,500 employees.
The educators voted to move Jan. 1 to the state-run Public Employees Insurance Program (PEIP), which offers lower premiums for its 4,500 members.
Superintendent Joe Gothard and school board chairwoman Zuki Ellis said in July that the district couldn’t afford the penalty. They asked the educators to wait a year.
In response, the St. Paul Federation of Educators and Teamsters Local 320 offered Tuesday to do just that. In return, they asked that the district increase the employer contribution to educators’ health plans.
Those increased contributions would cost $1.5 million, the union said. The district says it would be more like $3.6 million.
The school board met in private Thursday to discuss the matter.
On Friday, Gothard and Ellis rejected the offer in a series of letters that called the dispute “entirely avoidable.”
The administrators also said they don’t intend to abide by the unions’ Jan. 1 timeline. Instead, they said they’d wait till December 2020 to allow the unions to leave HealthPartners.
The state statute that authorizes public unions to change insurers, they note, “does not require any specific timeline.”
If the teachers still want to move forward, the district said, it would sue to “recoup any and all damages” for breaking the contract.
“There is a very simple resolution available to move past this dispute. Everyone involved should just keep their promises,” Gothard and Ellis wrote.
FAIR NEGOTIATION?
The controversy is taking place at the same time as negotiations on a new teachers union contract.
Teachers union President Nick Faber and Sylvia Perez, who leads nonlicensed personnel, called their Tuesday health insurance offer “a good faith effort of compromise on our part, despite our frustration that this situation could have been avoided with better partnership.
“It is offered as a means to resolve this circumstance, outside of regular contract negotiations,” they wrote.
Gothard and Ellis see things differently.
“The school district simply cannot allow any union to bargain in bad faith while using other School District employees, School District students and St. Paul taxpayers as leverage,” they wrote.
The unions have called on HealthPartners to voluntarily waive the $4 million penalty and for Gothard to lobby for the insurer to do so. Gothard said they’ve had “multiple conversations” to waive or reduce the penalty, but HealthPartners has refused.
