Health insurance for retired teachers was both an agenda item and the subject of public comment at Monday night’s School Committee meeting.
During the public comment period, former Harvard resident Keith Cheveralls, who is a past chairman of the School Committee and whose wife is a retired teacher, read from a letter he had sent to state Rep. Jen Benson. He asked her to urge the Harvard selectmen to reverse their recent vote transferring the retirees’ insurance from a state-run program to a regional consortium, a change that also increases the share of premiums the retirees must pay from 10 or 15 percent to at least 25 percent and sometimes 50 percent. In his letter, Cheveralls also expressed support for a bill Benson has sponsored that would make it illegal for a town to raise the share of premiums that retirees must pay.
Members of the School Committee did not respond directly to Cheveralls’ remarks, but they returned to the topic later in their meeting.
Chairwoman Mary Traphagen said she first learned of the insurance change from reading the newspaper. “I do wish that we had been consulted,” she said, while acknowledging that the decision was the selectmen’s to make. If her own father, a teacher, had faced a postretirement change like this, she said, “the bottom would have fallen out” of all the careful financial plans he had made. “This town is very small,” Traphagen concluded, “and we ought to be able to work together.”
Committee member SusanMary Redinger suggested that the best course of action would be to reach out to the Board of Selectmen and find a way to mitigate some of the impact on the retirees. “I don’t think it is the will of the town to do this” to people who spent years teaching Harvard’s children, Redinger said.
At the close of discussion, member John Ruark asked whether the group wanted to send the selectmen a letter covering the major points of the School Committee’s discussion: first, that the committee members disagree with the decision; second, that they are disappointed in the process, particularly the lack of consultation between boards; and third, that they want to work with the selectmen to improve the situation for retirees. But the committee members deferred any action until they can discuss the issue further.
