Lordstown teachers contend the district is violating past practice

Staff report

LORDSTOWN

The teachers union at Lordstown Local Schools believes the administration is withholding some of their health care benefits as a threat to get them to sign a new contract.

Superintendent Terry Armstrong, however, disputes that.

“Parents and our Lordstown community need to know that the district is hurting teachers and hurting our families,” Alyssa Brookbank, president of the Lordstown Teachers Association, said in a news release. “Treasurer [Mark] Ferrara and Superintendent [Terry] Armstrong need to stop hurting teachers by withholding our health-care benefits.”

The teachers’ contract expired last June, and the union has continued to work under the expired pact.

Armstrong said the district has fully paid the health-insurance premium. For teachers’ health-savings accounts, the district also pays teachers’ deductible, he said.

That’s $3,000 for a family and $1,500 for a single. The district has been paying those deductibles the last eight years, Armstrong said.

“We don’t believe we’re in violation of the contract,” he said. “It’s not in the contract when that payment has to be made.”

Because of what he called cash-flow problems, the district has paid 50 percent of the deductible. When the money comes in, the district plans to pay the remainder.

Unlike other school districts that received state-foundation payments every two weeks, Lordstown relies on local property-tax receipts disbursed by the county tax office, which usually come in April.

“We literally get zero in most state-foundation payments,” Armstrong said.

The district gets advances on the money from the county tax office and is waiting for those advances to pay the remainder of the HSA deductible, he said.

“The money we have, we’ve reserved for payroll,” Armstrong said. “It’s all based on tax collections. We have to be judicious.”

The teachers union’s news release said that bank records show the district has fully funded the teacher’s HSA in the first week of January.

But that past practice was violated this year, the union contends.

It says the district “refused to fund the health-care benefit unless teachers accepted the district negotiations proposal. As of Jan. 18, the district had paid nothing into the health-care fund.”

Armstrong said the decision has nothing to do with contract negotiations and that it’s not a negotiating tactic.

Contract negotiations are ongoing, the superintendent said.

The union filed a grievance last month, contending the lack of fully funding the HSA amounts to a violation of past practice.