Health costs slice into teacher pay
Budget cuts, medical coverage, job demands stretch money thin
As teacher strikes flared this spring in more than half a dozen states, protesters bemoaned stagnant salaries, overcrowded classrooms and a lack of basic supplies such as textbooks and computers.
Often missing from hand-scrawled placards and fiery speeches was the problem of skyrocketing health costs.
Many teachers have traditionally accepted a trade-off: In exchange for relatively low salaries, they could expect relatively generous benefits, including pensions and low- or nocost health premiums.
But in an era of $100,000-a-year drugs and government budget cuts, school districts struggle to find the money to keep up their end of the bar-
gain, forced to take away from classroom funding and even modest, costof-living raises. Many cash-strapped school boards, cities and legislatures view health care benefits as an unpredictable budget-buster.
Teachers are asked to fork over more of their paychecks to keep their health coverage, even as budget cuts impel them to use their own money for classroom supplies and to crowdsource money to buy computers.
In Jersey City, New Jersey, where health care expenses have gone up an average of 10 percent a year as district funding remained flat, teachers staged a one-day strike in March.
The underfunded school system faces a $110 million health care bill that is expected to increase 13 percent this year, so teachers and officials accepted a mutually imperfect solution that included changes to their health care plan to end the strike and avoid cuts that would have gutted schools.
Though the teacher strikes ebbed, deals brokered to end walkouts mostly offered temporary fixes, and no longterm solution is in sight.
Proposed cuts to health benefits in West Virginia were behind the first strike this year, which shuttered the state’s public schools for nine days and inspired similar protests in other states.
Pay equation doesn’t add up
Teacher pay was below the national average of $59,660 in the six states that saw significant demonstrations this year — West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina.
The average teacher salary in the USA has decreased by 4 percent since 2009, adjusted for inflation, according to a report released in April by the National Education Association, an advocacy group for public school teachers. During that time, public schools have seen their revenue shrink as federal funding dropped 19.5 percent. Congress made across-the-board spending cuts known as budget sequestration that took effect in 2013.
As funding has declined, the cost of health insurance has gone up. State and local governments paid 14.5 percent more last year to cover a primary, secondary or special education teacher and her or his family than they did in
2008, adjusted for inflation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2017, family coverage for one teacher cost state and local governments an average of $1,010.85 a month.
Primary, secondary and special education teachers paid 25.4 percent more last year to insure themselves and their families than they did in
2008, according to data adjusted for inflation.
Teachers paid an average of $585.71 a month – more than $7,000 annually – in premiums for family health insurance coverage in March 2017.
Various states, common themes
The standoff in West Virginia typified the strains in states grappling with rising benefit costs on budgets strained by tax cuts and the recession.
When state lawmakers proposed a mere 1 percent raise to an average salary of $45,555, teachers pushed back. They refused to return to work until lawmakers agreed to a 5 percent raise and delayed health care increases so a task force could review them.
In Oklahoma, strikers focused their complaints on operational costs such as textbooks and salaries. They secured roughly an extra half a billion dollars, said Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association. “We got everything that we could out of legislators this year,” she said.
Though the state covers teachers’ individual premiums, covering a spouse and children can cost an additional $1,200 a month, Priest said.
She said some teacher aides work only for the health insurance for their families.
Though the advent of summer break has calmed the protests, more strikes look likely, said Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former Massachusetts secretary of education. The fact that most teachers negotiated at least some concessions proved the tactic effective enough.
“The shoe is pinching,” he said, “and people are reacting.”
Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.