Reply to Budget- CE recommended budget $55.7M less

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[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]

MCPS has low premiums relative to other public employees.

For example at MCPS a 12 month employee with a spouse and kids pays between $130 and $150 biweekly for a POS plan depending on whether they do the health screening thing. County government employees (which include bus drivers, firefighters, police, corrections, and social workers) pay $190 biweekly. Part of it is that county employees pay 20% of the cost and MCPS employees pay 17% (though it's actually going to be less than 17% since the premiums aren't covering the total and general dollars are being used to make up the difference).

I don't think some of you realize that money doesn't grow on trees? You can't have cheap insurance AND get the pay increases you want AND get money to pay for all the renovations you want and have the county pay for all the roads and bike lanes and everything else you want. And having premiums that don't cover claims is what creates the budget freezes that are impacting staff and students right now. This is not sustainable.[/quote]

I totally agree.  Folks are going to have to start picking what they want.  You can’t get pay raises,  low cost premiums w/ gold level health insurance and pensions plus all the other things needed to fund the system without revenue in the county.[/quote]

You think teachers just “get” pensions? They pay into the pension system every single paycheck and they have no say in it. Most teachers won’t ever see a dime of it bc no one wants to stick around for the 25 years and the amount you can roll over into a 401k after leaving is laughable. Stop acting like you have any idea what you’re talking about because you clearly don’t.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics