Reply to Budget- CE recommended budget $55.7M less

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Reply to "Budget- CE recommended budget $55.7M less"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Btw the MCPS budget includes $40 million to plug the anticipated gap in the health insurance fund for employees. In other words, they already know the employer and employee premiums won't be enough to cover claims. Instead of working with the union to address this issue (by lowering costs and/or raising premiums), they are asking for millions from county taxpayers and threatening to cut services for students if we don't pay. [/quote]

They need to change insurance plans and charge more for premiums like the county does and most employers. [/quote]

That is a double-edged sword. The staffing crisis, particularly special ed teachers, paras, and SLPs, is only getting worse. Many people are very unhappy. And some of those unhappy people are only staying in the job because they feel handcuffed by having good insurance. If it gets expensive and worse, I promise you more people will quit, because they already wanted to and the last reason to put up with the garbage will be gone. They also already sold this year's change from CareFirst to Cigna as a way to get the same coverage for cheaper and appear to have gotten that spectacularly wrong or had one pulled over on them by Cigna, so why should anyone trust them to know what they're doing with this? [/quote]

The solution to that is to do a targeted pay raise for SPED positions, and to provide benefits to paras. It's not fiscally practical to increase benefits for everyone.[/quote]

It is more complicated than you think. Physics teachers are impossible to find. Should they raise their pay and not other teachers? PE teachers are very easy to find. Should they lower their pay? [/quote]

Yes to Physics no to lowering pay for PE. Honestly much easier to simply put caps on CO bloat than nickle and diming everyone.[/quote]

Guys, they still have to work out the health insurance issue. They have to reduce costs or increase premiums. MCPS pays for 83% of premiums so employees bear a minority of cost increases, which of course is still impactful. But a yearly injection of $40 million is not going to happen long term so they need to figure it out.[/quote]

There's nothing to figure out. They need to raise the employee contributions to something a little closer to other public sector jobs.[/quote]

Increasing premiums means increasing employer and employee contributions. Demanding $40 million and threatening not to fix moldy schools of they don't get it means MCPS as a system bears the entire cost.[/quote]

They need to increase the employees' share of premiums. 12%/17% is incredibly low.[/quote]

I agree with you, but the problem at hand is the total premiums.[/quote]

No, the immediate problem is that the premiums aren't enough. The budget problem for next year is that we can't keep paying 88%/83% of the premiums.[/quote]

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