Modesto superintendent calls for collaboration to address rising healthcare costs
Modesto City Schools Superintendent Vanessa Buitrago has written a letter to local education and policy leaders asking to collaborate on solutions for the cost of healthcare for employees. She said that rising costs of healthcare are financially untenable for districts to individually cover and that educators deserve affordable healthcare.
She said further study should be done on healthcare pooling, whereby educators statewide would be able to opt into a single, large insurance pool. That solution would require legislation to be passed.
“I think that really the most responsible option is to pool all educators across the state and have an opportunity for them to opt into healthcare,” Buitrago said. “When you’ve got thousands and thousands of people using that same coverage, it’s going to drop the price.”
The superintendent added that at the last Board of Education meeting, she heard teachers say their monthly medical costs were higher than their mortgage payments. She called that situation “unacceptable.”
“We have teachers trying to decide between insuring their child or insuring their spouse. These are decisions that really should not have to be made. While I would love to say we are committed to insuring every staff member and every staff member’s family, we aren’t funded to do that without seriously looking at layoffs, looking at cutting programs for students.”
It would take tens of millions of dollars annually from the district for teachers to actually feel relief from district contributions, according to Buitrago.
“It isn’t that we don’t want to contribute toward healthcare. It is that even if we present a proposal within negotiations that costs us $20 million over the course of the next two years, that isn’t even a small dent in what a teacher will get toward health insurance,” she continued.
Superintendent named to statewide working group on healthcare costs
Buitrago was selected to be part of State Superintendent Tony Thurmond’s statewide TK–12 healthcare cost workgroup focused on this issue. She was notified of her acceptance into the 15-person working group on May 27.
According to district spokesperson Linda Mumma Solorio, “the workgroup will examine the factors driving rising healthcare costs for California’s public education workforce, identify impacts on school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools, and develop actionable policy recommendations for the State Superintendent’s consideration.” A start date for the working group is yet to be announced.
Some of the groups she hopes to collaborate with on this proposal include the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the California School Board Association, the California Association of Suburban School Districts and state lawmakers.
“There must be a broad and serious discussion in California about whether the current fragmented district-by-district healthcare benefits system can be viable for public education systems over time,” she stated in the letter. The letter has been sent to Cal Ed Partners, California Association of Suburban School Districts, and California Office to Reform Education. It will also be shared with the California School Boards Association and the Association of California School Administrators.
Healthcare costs have been a sticking point in the district’s ongoing negotiations with the Modesto Teachers Association.
“California already utilizes large-scale public employee healthcare systems through existing state structures. The state should not overlook opportunities to explore whether those models may also offer long-term affordability and sustainability benefits for public education systems,” her letter continued.
In an interview with The Modesto Bee, Buitrago added that continuing to ask the state for healthcare funding to schools isn’t tenable. “We’re just going to continue to need more funding from the state,” Buitrago said. “So at what point will that end?”
She said in her letter that districts need relief now, not years later, and that the issue of rising healthcare costs and districts’ financial sustainability is one that she has seen “grow for decades, and we should have been alarmed many years ago.”
“I’m a person who loves this community, is all about this community, and I’m deeply concerned about the potential for this issue to lead to a strike,” Buitrago said in her interview with The Bee. “I’m worried because I’ve seen the impact that strikes have on communities … I also, as a human, believe that everybody deserves affordable healthcare, period. That shouldn’t even be a question.”
