School District Employees to Become Self-Insured

The Haverford Township School District's unionized employees are entering into the newly created Delaware County Public Schools Healthcare Trust, which will administer health care coverage to 11 other school districts in the county.

The Delaware County Intermediate Unit, a regional education services agency, will join 12 school districts in the trust. Each school district will have one labor and one management representative on the trust. The representative for the associations is Michael Mullen, chair of the teacher's union, Haverford Township Education Association.

Haverford's superintendent Dr. William Keilbaugh will represent Delaware County's Superintendent's Council for the program's inaugural year.

Larry O’Shea, director of the DCIU, told Haverford Patch that the health care trust could be the “potential for us to redefine the labor management relationship in the county.”

Conversations started two years ago about creating a self-insured plan for employees, O’Shea said.

He said that $7.2 million across the participating school districts and the DCIU could be saved up front, and there could be more at the end of the year depending on the utilization of services.

The district's business manager Rick Henderson said that the district may save $700,000 in budget year 2013-14 from the new health care administration program.

That will be "the big one time savings," Keilbaugh said. So what is the district doing with it?

"Not taxing the taxpayer," he responded. "It made many school districts have a much better budget situation going into next year."

For the first year all the current health care plan designs among the districts will stay in place. But those 29 different plans will be whittled down to 3 to 5, which will save money on administrative costs.

The plans that the trust expects to propose to the district employees would represent the range of options that currently exist, O’Shea said.

O’Shea said he hopes a successful health care trust could lead to management and labor groups “potentially working down the road on other issues in a collaborative manner.”

Many corporations are doing this, in addition to school districts around Philadelphia and elsewhere in the state.

"We’re following a fairly well-beaten path," Keilbaugh said.