001All right, we're going to start recording and get started. That's cool. Welcome to the St. Frank Valley Schools Board of Education study session of November 19, 2025. Sarah, would you please call the roll? Sure. Mrs. Bath? Present. Mr. Berthold? Present. Mrs. Gilligan? Present. Mrs. Horanek, here. Mr. LeChuga? Here. Mrs. Raglin? Here. Mrs. Weiss? Here. Thank you. And I will just turn it right over to Dr. Jackie Caputian to introduce our presenters. Sure, thank you. So we have an amazing team this evening who are going to present to you some information about employee benefits. And I will tell you that this is one area that is really, really important in our district. It's very costly to provide the benefits that we do to our employees. There are big decisions that have to be made around it.
002There's a lot of negotiating and a lot of research that has to be done to make sure that we're getting the very best care for our folks at the best possible price. And it's incredibly costly, as we all know, but health care is costly. And so it's a large portion of our budget. And we have a team that does amazing work to monitor, to work closely with insurance companies, as well as a third-party intermediary who supports and negotiates on our behalf. They have a lot of expertise in this area. It's an area in my role, my new role that I am really having to get spun up on. I'm excited to hear the information again because I think it takes a little bit of time to really understand the complexities. But with us this evening
003doing this work and the presentation is Tony out of Finance and Justin out of Finance, as well as Amanda out of HR and Christina is new to our team and comes very highly recommended for her expertise in this area. So thank you to all of you for the work that you're going to present this evening. And I'm going to turn it over to you. Wonderful. Thank you so much for the opportunity to present this evening. I know it's been a moment since you've had an update in the area of benefits. And we can get started. As you know, this is our guidepost and our strategic priorities centered around benefits, ensuring that we have supports and opportunities around staff lobbying. Amanda, I'm going to ask you to speak up a little bit just to make sure
004that we capture everything. Absolutely. Thanks. And then as shared earlier, it is providing benefits to employees is a very important thing. And yet at the same time, we do closely monitor how we provide our benefit offerings in relation to maintaining our strong district finances. I would love to turn it over to Christina. And thank you for sharing your expertise. Of course. Thank you, Amanda. First of all, good evening, President Raglin, members of the board. My name is Christina Nespoletta. And I am I've just joined St. Rain as benefits manager reporting to Amanda Thompson. My role primarily focuses on oversight of our total benefits and wellness programs. I also focus on benefits education, ensuring that our employees have access to simplified information. So they can make informed decisions about their health care and get the most
005value out of their benefits. I'm very proud to work for St. Rain. And I truly feel that our generous and competitive benefit programs is one of the many reasons that St. Rain stands out as an employer of choice. And so this evening, I'm very pleased to present you an overview of the current benefits that we offer. And we'll go ahead and get started. And I'm wondering if one of you could send the board and myself and anybody here a copy of the presentation. Some of the writing and the numbers are going to be small and it's going to be difficult for us to share the information. That would be great. Yes, I will work with you. It looks like the board has it. We do. So maybe if I could get a copy and Dina,
006do you have it? Carrie and Tim, that would be great. Thanks. Sorry, you can keep going. No problem. Thank you. So to start off, we've put together a high-level overview of the different types of benefit categories that we offer to our employees. We offer health insurance, which gives employees a choice between medical, dental, and vision plans. And that coverage extends to the whole family, spouses, and children. And that's available to part-time employees and full-time employees all the way down to 17 and a half hours per week. So that's very generous in comparison to other districts. We also offer life insurance packages, including a district-paid life insurance benefit for all employees up to down to 10 hours per week or more. And then there's also voluntary life coverage that's available for an additional fee that covers
007employees, spouses, and children. We also offer disability and leave programs. We have a voluntary short-term disability insurance program. We have a voluntary sick leave bank, which is a community pool of donated sick leave hours. We also have paid annual leave, and we have sick leave as well. And we also offer job protection under the FMLA. We also offer tax-advantaged accounts, including flexible spending accounts. These are accounts where employees can contribute a portion of their paycheck towards expenses such as medical or dependent daycare expenses, and they can save on taxes when they contribute to those types of accounts. And then we also have a really nice wellness program. It's something our district is very well known for. That includes on-site nurse coaching, preventive health screenings, community wellness activities, and an employee assistance program. And then we
008also offer retirement options through PARA. Of course, we have our PARA pension plan that every employee contributes to. And then we have voluntary retirement savings plans through PARA as well. We have a 401K and a 457 plan. A few important points to add as well. Regarding the dependent PARA flex spending accounts, we had the opportunity recently to share about our open enrollment and our benefit structure with our teachers at one of our AR meetings. And they highly value the dependent PARA flex spending account. That helps them with putting money away regarding daycare for their children. And so we received a lot of positive feedback in that area. And then also in relation to retirement and the PARA contributions. So in relation to health premiums that we support with our employees and the PARA contributions and
009individuals' pay through their compensation, we are really continuing to educate around total compensation. And so that is encompassing again our benefits, our base pay, and then the PARA retirement contributions. Thank you, Amanda. I agree. The dependent care FSA is, we have high participation in that dependent care FSA, which is a good, that's a good sign. In comparison to other districts, we do have higher than usual participation in both of those essays. Do you mind if I, does everyone know what FSAs are, dependent care and health? Okay, great. Just want to make sure, as we use acronyms and stuff, we want to make sure everyone's aware. Thank you, Tom. Because we're happy to chime in and clarify any of the things, any of the acronyms or things that you're curious about. Please, please ask. We're happy
010to talk about them. I always hate to just presume that everyone's already apprised of those things. Thank you, Tom. What's the difference between an FSA and an HSA? Yeah, I can take that. So an FSA is a flexible spending account. I like to think of it as a spending account. So you have to use the funds in the same year that you contribute them per IRS rules. An HSA is a savings account. So you don't have to spend it in the same year and you can roll over the funds that you've contributed year over year. And so an HSA, though, is limited to individuals who are enrolled in a high deductible health plan. Currently, the district doesn't have a high deductible health plan, but we may in the future. And that's something that we may
011offer alongside a high deductible health plan. That was about to be my question if you had one. Yeah, thank you for your question. Thank you for your question. Simply because it's relevant right now, I wanted to clarify we do have an HRA, which is a health reimbursement account. So instead of where a savings where an employee is contributing to this account and it's building up and they draw it down, an HRA is where we actually contribute to the first $750 of their deductible to help offset deductible costs. Thank you for that question. Next, I'd like to share a little bit about the key features of our medical dental and vision plans just to kind of explain why they're so great. Why employees choose them. We have three choices of medical plans. I'll first go over
012our self-funded medical plans, which is our two under the health insurance company UMR. UMR is a United Health Care company. The first plan option we have for employees is the UMR Choice Plus with HRA. And as Tony just led into that discussion, an HRA is a health reimbursement account. It's really a notional account that the district funds and it's simply to help offset the deductibles on that plan. So the deductible on that plan is $2,500 and the district actually contributes $1,000 towards that HRA. So that when an employee has a claim, that HRA balance automatically offsets any out-of-pocket expense that the employee may incur. And so it's really nice for the first few months of the year, employees have doctor visits and things like that, and they get no bill because that HRA is covering
013that out-of-pocket expense. So that is a key feature of our UMR Choice Plus plan. We also offer another UMR option called, we call it the Direct Primary Care option. This one does not come with an HRA. The difference with this plan is it's more co-pay driven. So you're just going to pay flat fees for things like doctor visits, specialist visits, emergency room, and things like that. The nice thing about the Direct Primary Care plan is that we have partnered with a local primary care provider called Carex Health, or you may have known them as NextEra Healthcare. Their closest location is in our parking lot on Main Street and Prep. Our employees love the Direct Care plan because of its accessibility. They can go to any Carex Health location an unlimited amount of times for free.
014Nothing will ever be charged to the employee when they visit Direct Primary Care. The nice thing is they're a membership only type of primary care, so they only serve their members. And so there is more doctors to go around, and employees enjoy same day, next day appointments. They don't have to wait weeks to get in, and they can text their doctor, they can get after hours appointments, and in many cases they can avoid the urgent care or emergency room, which also in turn saves the district a lot of money. And then we have additional programs that enhance our UMR plans. These are all included at no additional premium for employees. We have ZeroCard, which is a unique feature where employees can go to, if they need a procedure such as a knee surgery or an
015x-ray or physical therapy, they can go to a ZeroCard provider for absolutely nothing. It's free. In turn, the district pays the claim, but we get a 30% discount on that claim. So the district is saving money and the employee is paying nothing, and our employees rave about ZeroCard. They absolutely love it. We also include programs such as Hinge Health, which is virtual physical therapy from the comfort of home. Origin Health, which is a hospital service app that comes to home. Origin saves the district significant dollars by performing hospital type services in the home instead of in a hospital setting. So it's something that we've added on to save the district significant dollars, and employees also have a very low co-pay for using Origin Health. And then we have PrudentRx, which provides employees who take specialty
016medications with zero dollar medications. Again, kind of similar to zero. Employees pay nothing, and the district receives a large discount on that medication. So both sides win. Employees love these programs, and they're all included with UMR enrollment. We also offer a third option for medical insurance called the Kaiser Permanente DHMO plan, or deductible health maintenance organization is technically what that acronym means. This plan is through Kaiser Permanente. If you're not familiar with Kaiser Permanente, they are an HMO or a health maintenance organization, and they offer an integrated care solution. So instead of having to pick your doctor and specialist and your radiology and find a lab to get your blood work, Kaiser does that all in-house and makes the care navigation simplified for the employee. They also offer lower deductibles on this plan, and so
017employees are attracted to those lower deductibles and those affordable co-pays as well. Our dental plan is through Delta Dental of Colorado. We offer two options. Our lower option is called the value plan, and that we offer a zero dollar employee premium, so employees really enjoy being able to get free dental insurance, and they don't have to be enrolled in any of our other benefits to get that. And then the classic plan is a little bit of a buy-up plan, and they can get orthodontic coverage with that plan for adults and children. And with both of these plans, employees can choose any dentist they want. There's benefits for in-network and out-of-network dentists. And then finally, we have the vision care plan through VSP. We offer one plan through VSP. It provides comprehensive vision coverage, benefits for
018eyeglasses, contacts, frames, and eye exams for the whole family. And two quick additions in regards to origin health and hinge health. We put that in last school year, so this is our second year that we are continuing and then into the years after. As a result of looking at our claims data and looking at some of the highest health conditions, one was muscular skeletal and providing as many opportunities for individuals to receive care. Sometimes it takes a moment to see a physical therapist, and by putting in hinge health, and we saw it demonstrated with your cell phone, and there's a coach on the other side trying to show you the right therapies. From a convenience standpoint, we received positive feedback, and we'd like to see more enrollment in that, so we're going to continue to
019educate our employees on those opportunities. And then origin health, we are starting to see some increase in participation as well for many reasons, including not if you're sick, if you need an x-ray, some of our individuals who are on some infusion therapy, they will come to your home and do that for you in your home. So maybe just one more thing about this slide. So that Kaiser plan is a fully insured model, and then the UMR plans are self-insured models. So the bottom left, the things we're talking about that everybody loves that are great, it's kind of our opportunity to get creative because we're self-insured, and so they're not only beneficial with things like free services for employees, but they're also cost savings measures for the district. So the zero card, like the classic example
020is, is you can pay anywhere from $110 for an x-ray to $1,000 for an x-ray, depending on where you go, and so it drives folks to low cost but comparable providers, right? You're not getting less of a service for it, but we've negotiated, or zero card has negotiated better prices, and so that way it's a way for the district to save and for the employee to save. And the hinge health, I mean the idea there, it's great service for the employee, but we're also trying to prevent back surgeries, which are really expensive to the district and everybody. So there are ways where we can get creative to manage the risk. Thank you, Justin. That's correct. So whenever we're looking to customize our self-insured plan, we're really looking for solutions that not only are popular with
021employees, that's a great plus, but also are addressing those higher cost conditions that we're aware of and that is going to save the district money, either through a discount arrangement or just preventive care for employees to prevent their conditions from happening. On this slide, I just wanted to give you a general overview of the utilization of our medical plans and how many of our employees take advantage of this by enrolling. So I've broken out the numbers by plan type. Across the top, you see our Kaiser, our UMR Choice HRA, and our UMR Direct Care, and then down on the left, you see that broken out a little bit further by family level. So majority of our employees are enrolled in employee-only coverage, 65%, and then we have a total of almost 3,000 employees currently enrolled
022with only 3,884 eligible. So a large majority of our eligible employees are taking our health insurance. That's a good sign. And the others may have other options out there. They may have spouse insurance, they may have Medicare, or things like that. What's interesting is that we do see the population of our employees favoring the UMR plans, and we think that that is by design. That is because our UMR plans have all those extra programs, those added programs, and employees really like those programs. We continually get great feedback. And then there's folks that just prefer an integrated HMO model, and they choose Kaiser Permanente for that reason. And so we see just about the mix we would expect with the current plan designs. And we meet with Kaiser and UMR leadership to provide feedback through our
023negotiations of renewal and also through service and access availability for members. And so Kaiser is starting to notice the robust nature of the UMR plans as well, and they have opportunity to offer additional support. All right. So the district's also very proud to offer a wellness program that complements our health insurance offerings and provides additional health, sorry, holistic support, and addresses risk factors at their preventive stages. And so our employees absolutely love our wellness program. We have multiple components to our program. The wellness program has a mission statement that's up here at the top. And so we also offer on-site nurse coaching. So since 2014, the district has partnered with Boulder Valley Care Network and Kaiser Permanente. And these organizations have generously staffed our district with dedicated nurse health coaches that serve our employees. And
024their pictures are here. They are credentialed in nursing and health coaching. They are highly qualified, highly experienced, and they've all been with our district for over 10 years. Their goal is to provide support in any area that an employee wants to focus on. And they have offices in our Lincoln Building in North Longmont to provide a comfortable and confidential setting for employees to come visit in person. And they also offer services virtually, or they can come to the employee if that's what they prefer. They attend our district events, and they visit our schools quite regularly to spread awareness about the program, offer services. They're wonderful. And then we also have an employee assistance program. This program is available to all employees and their families and household members at no cost. The EAP offers programs such
025as counseling, financial and legal consultation, crisis intervention services. So if there's a crisis at a school or something like that, the EAP would visit and provide crisis intervention services to our staff. It also offers a variety of resources for finding child care assistance, even preparing your estate and your will, and guiding those who have, who are beneficiaries, have lost a loved one and are beneficiaries and need financial advice. In addition to these two great programs, we also offer on-site preventive screening events twice a year. We actually just finished, in October we just finished our on-site biometrics and flu shots event. We traveled around to a variety of different schools and had a couple of events right here in this room where employees were invited to come and get their flu shot, a biometric screening and
026speak with our doctors and nurses from Carex Health. And Carex Health is the one that puts on this event for us. They're very generous and they don't charge the district anything. They just come in and offer that great service to our employees. And we also offer mammogram events for women over 40. And those are put on by our partners at UC Health here in Longmont and our Longmont medical office at Kaiser Permanente. So we also just got finished with those. Employees love the mammogram events. We have had feedback that things have been caught through our mammogram event, and they're very grateful that we offer this type of service for them to come and get that kind of thing detected before it's too late. And we believe this is a really important, these are important events
027to continue to host and hold. One for early screening and intervention that we see with not only the biometric screenings and the assessments, but again with the mammogram events. And our employees appreciate the access to right here on site to be able to take care of these and not have to drive to another location far away. And coming into the events, it's almost like a reunion. It's really neat to see. It's a very familial type event with snacks and there's prizes. And we really want to incentivize for our employees to take care of themselves and participate in these screenings. And this is one of the ways that the mammogram events and the biometric screenings is one of the ways that our vendors that we partner with for our benefits give back to the district. And
028that really enhances the partnership, in my opinion. They offer gift bags to our employees, gift cards. They give them a little coupon for the Starbucks downstairs afterwards. It's just something that employees look forward to. It fills up fast. It's a very popular event and we added two a year so that we could make sure we accommodate everybody. All right. Next, I would like to tell you about the benefits team and all of the different ways that the benefits team supports our employees year round. We have Lori, LaTisha, Shara, and myself working year round to answer phones, emails, any inquiries from employees who need assistance with enrollment, new hires who have questions about the plans. And we are always listening to our employees and what they what they're experiencing with their benefits so that we can
029make sure that we take that into consideration when we make changes. And so we can always make sure that we're evolving our programs, meeting our staff's needs, listening to their experiences that they're having at NextEra, at Kaiser, at UMR, and making sure that we that we are taking that feedback to heart. We analyze participation and trends and we are always using data, both numbers data, qualitative and quantitative data to enhance our programs. We also provide enhanced support during open enrollment. We just finished our annual open enrollment period about a week ago from November 3rd to 14th. Every year we allow employees an opportunity to go in and look at what's new for the coming year, make changes to their benefits, make changes to the dependence that they cover for the coming year. And so during
030that time, it's a really busy time for the benefits team. We do a lot of extra communication and extra support. We create letters, we mail them out to homes. We print benefit guides and provide those to our employees. We enhance our website with all of the benefits materials and information that they could need. And we're available for extended hours. And we also have enrollment computer labs where this year for the first time we invited our partners at UMR, Kaiser, and NextEra. And we had like a benefits fair where you could come in, talk to the vendors, and get some enrollment help from my team. So we helped hundreds of employees enroll that needed assistance, either technology or just felt better having someone in person to help them. So they really loved that very well attended
031event. And overall, open enrollment was very successful. It was a passive enrollment. What that means is that they weren't required to go in and make changes unless they unless they wanted to. So every if someone didn't want to make any changes, then all they had to do was step back, not make not touch their enrollment. And we would just carry forward what they are currently enrolled in. When we have years like that, we don't expect a lot of participation in open enrollment. But I'm very pleased to see that we had about 30 percent of our employees and actually go in, read the information that we put out and enroll and make some sort of change or touch their enrollment in some way. So that's a that's a very good sign that our communications were effective
032and that our assistance was was very supportive. A question in cases like that where the federal government will increase dependent care spending FSA. How does that work for people who don't? Great question. We actually did increase the dependent care FSA limit this open enrollment. And so what will happen is every year that we have a passive enrollment, the IRS actually doesn't allow the FSA, the dependent care FSA and the health care FSA to roll over. That's always going to be a benefit that has to be reelected actively by the employee every single year. So we do communicate that in all of our materials. We say it's a passive enrollment except for your FSA. If you want to be enrolled in your FSA, you do have to go in and elect. So they can go in
033and reelect the same limit that they had this current year or they can reelect the increased limit. So just for context, the IRS defines the limit that employees can contribute to a flexible spending account. And that limit typically increases every year with inflation. And so but they have a cap on it because they are tax advantaged accounts. And so just like with any tax advantage account, there's a limit on how much you can contribute this year. Twenty twenty six was the historically the largest increase the government's ever released for the limit on dependent care FSA. It's always been five thousand dollars for the past 40 years. And this year, the IRS raised that to seventy five hundred. And so employees were able to go in and elect that increase limit if they wanted to. That
034is the dependent care FSA is per family. Great question. The health care FSA is per individual. All right. And I just wanted to go over the very minimal changes that we made to our benefits for twenty twenty six. We did not introduce a lot of major plan design changes this year. And that was part of the reason why we were allowed to do a passive enrollment because there was no big changes going on. We did not increase our deductibles, our out of pocket maximums, our co-insurance or our co-pays. We didn't change our carriers. We gave everyone the same options as they've had in the past. We did make adjustments to employee costs, but we kept those as minimal as possible. And most employees only experienced about a four dollar increase on their medical premium. We
035did decrease the employee cost on the Kaiser plan to bring that pricing more in parity with our U.M.R. plans. And then we also allowed that passive enrollment so that for convenience employees didn't really have to go in and do anything unless they wanted to make changes. We did enhance our benefit plans. We lowered this is this is for compliance with the Mental Health and Addiction Parity Act to make sure that we were offering the same benefits for mental health that we're offering for physical health. We have to make sure that those are in parity. So in response to that, we lowered co-pays for mental health office visits to zero dollars. They were formerly thirty dollars, so now that's zero. And and then unrelated, but a different piece of legislation that came down was the like
036I mentioned was the dependent care FSA limit raised to seventy five hundred dollars. So this increased limit gives many employees the opportunity to save additional pre-tax dollars, which helps them be able to afford their daycare a little bit easier. We currently have about half of our employees who participate in the dependent care FSA, the daycare FSA, max it out. They contribute the maximum. So that tells us that we will see more employees taking advantage of this higher limit. So looking ahead into the next few years, I truly believe that a long term strategy for benefits is paramount to running a sustainable benefits program. We need a foundation of clear priorities and I think our undisputed priorities with our benefits plans is always to keep employee health and well-being at top of mind. That is our
037top priority is to make sure our staff is healthy and prepared and feel well supported at work. We always want to be able to offer the most affordable and competitive plans that we possibly can. And we always want to make sure we maintain choice between plans. And by that I mean choice between Kaiser or another option or choice between two health insurance options, choice between a couple of different dental insurance options. That's what this ensures that we are responding to the diversity of our families in our district. We're making sure that we design different types of plans for the different types of families. We also recognize that we have opportunities that we need to be that we thoroughly need to analyze that we need to be aware of when we're designing our strategy. We need
038to look at our current plan designs. Our plan designs haven't changed in a while. We've had the same plans for over a decade. We've added on different solutions in response to different challenges. And it's time to evaluate that design and make sure that that is still serving our employees. We also want to continue to listen to member experiences, the care accessibility issues that we sometimes have in our more rural areas of St. Brayne. And so we're looking at all of that. We're also looking at the national health care landscape. Legislation is coming down at lightning speed. Health care costs are rising. And we need to make sure that we are aware of our environment when we're designing our strategy. Looking ahead for the next three years, this team, this leadership team is lockstep in collaboration
039with designing a strategy that is going to respond to the needs of our employees. We need to identify cost-saving solutions to save the district money to make sure that we're being prudent with our spending. Benefits is one of the highest costs that the district incurs every year. And we take that responsibility very seriously. We will be in the near future conducting an employee benefits survey to make sure we have that employee voice when we make decisions. And then we also want to continue providing education to our employees to help them navigate our different plans. It can be confusing. Benefits is one of the most confusing things for employees. And that is my goal is to make sure our employees have all of the information they need to understand and to simplify their benefits so they
040can get the most value out of them and so that they can be smarter health care consumers. When they are navigated to the right side of care, they save money and the district save money. And the team really works hard, Christina, and the team. And if we are hearing that an employee can't get access in a timely manner or that their family is experiencing a particular health care crisis, we can utilize our contacts with our health care providers to help get access sooner. And we have called some of our benefit company executives to try and get care to our employees quickly if they are struggling. Yeah, that's a nice thing about having the benefits team is we hear employee concerns and we do something about it. We get on the phone with our account executives
041and we make that situation right for our employees. We advocate for our employees and so they don't have to necessarily always deal with the health insurance company when they have a customer service issue. We get involved right away and make sure that that employees. All right. And unless there's any questions, we'll move to the next segment for our financial overview. But I'm happy to answer any other questions you all may have. I had a quick question. In the beginning, you were talking about communicating like total compensation to employees. What does that typically look like? And do they have like a dashboard where they can see, you know, their salary and their benefits and their 401k and whatever else? Great question. Right now within our we are working to create more of a dashboard. So it's
042a it's in one place. We do have various places within the employee portal that they can see that will continue to enhance where we want to go in this coming spring into next year as we communicate about compensation and total compensation is doing so in the dashboard. But also in our in our communications when we communicate out around pay increases and and so forth into the coming year. So we are going to continue to enhance that. When we go into Infinite Visions, we can see from a paycheck what the district is contributing and what the areas that. And we think there's an additional opportunity in Infinite Visions to make that even better. And have there's there's a tab that we may be able to have. Yeah, I just ask because I know sometimes employees compensation
043is just their salary might not realize a lot more than they really think. And I want to add that during open enrollment, they receive a confirmation statement after they submit their elections. And that confirmation statement lists both the employee contribution for the year and the employer contribution. And when we helped folks in person, we always wanted we always made sure to point out that they're paying this amount monthly, but the district is paying this amount just for their information. That's that's another great observation, Jocelyn, is that there's a lot more employees that's not directly monetary, not explicitly called out as a dollar amount that we're contributing on their behalf. Like the Employee Assistance Program, I think our group, like the four of us, we were talking about the Employee Assistance Program. And a few of
044us were like, well, REAP does that. I didn't realize that. So obviously we can do a better job, I think, at communicating all of the other opportunities that are available to our employees. And that's definitely something that we're working on. There is a lot of really great things that we do provide employees and we want them to utilize that. It's not only good for them, but it's good for our ability to attract and retain employees and the best teachers that we can get to ultimately for the for our kids. Right. That's what it's all about. And then next our finance. I have a quick question. One of the other benefits that I've seen in benefit packages for people primarily who live out of district or somewhat out of district is a commuter plan. Are we
045thinking about any of those types of benefits for our staff and teachers? Yeah. So I think what you mean is a flexible spending account for commuter. Well, yeah, maybe it's called flexible. We call it a commuter plan. Yeah. I think that's kind of along the same lines. What I'm thinking is we allow employees to contribute dollars to pre-tax dollars to an account and they can use those pre-tax dollars to pay for commuter benefits. Is that kind of what you're thinking? It could be. My company does it a little differently. They actually pay for it, I think. Yeah, there's plenty of different designs. Yeah, that's something that we need to investigate through an employee benefits survey. That's something that we have in the work next year is to gauge what employees feel that they're missing from
046our benefits program and see if there's something that we can add on. And yeah, there's a lot of great programs that we can add on that really don't cost the district anything and aren't terrible to administer. And so, yeah, that's definitely something that we would consider. We hear a voice. Is there gain information working with that? Yes. Yep, absolutely. I'll go ahead and bring our wellness slide back up. That would be a great topic for our nurse coaches to address with our employees. They can also use the EAP if they prefer more self-guided assistance and resources. But our nurse coaches will actually meet with employees one on one and help them with any goal they'd like. It doesn't have to be physical. It can be diet and exercise. But our nurse coaches will set goals
047with them, put them on a plan, and do regular check-ins. They're RNs, so they can take vitals and measure actual improvement in health over time. This would be a great resource for that. And then additionally, in our employee wellness program, we offer monthly events, seasonal events, where we have very large participation. For example, October, we have financial wellness month. We have cooking lessons, healthy cooking lessons that we offer. And they are selling out, not selling out, space availability that is very popular. So slots fill quickly. So I know that there's the targeted health and wellness support through our nurses. But also, we do that programmatically, not only from a climate and culture and relational standpoint, but also to take care of the visits. We've probably been in the bathroom and seen flyers and stuff. We
048have a wellness technician that puts on year-round wellness activities for our employees, and we get insane participation. I'm so proud. We have a reading challenge over the winter break, for example. In three days, we got 100 participants. And so we are always adding something that fits the seasonality. We did October. It was our biggest participation yet. More registrants and more teams than we have ever had in the past. And so these events are super important to our employees. They enhance camaraderie, and it focuses on more than just physical wellness with things like October. Our wellness activities focus a lot on social wellness and occupational wellness as well. We like to focus on all dimensions of wellness. It's not always physical. We like to focus on spiritual and emotional wellness as well. So we're always looking
049for events that will fulfill other areas of wellness. It's not everyone's always focused on physical. And I was just wondering if you could spend just a second talking about eligibility for classified staff. So all employees above 17 and a half hours a week are eligible for benefits. And that includes the medical, dental, and vision plans. The amount that the district contributes towards those benefits is tiered based on their hours worked per week. So we have three tiers. We have a full-time tier, which is going to get the maximum employer contribution. And then we have two smaller tiers that are basically for our 0.75 FTEs and our 0.5 FTEs. And so they still are eligible for the benefits, but they have received a slightly lower employer contribution. And then are subs able to pay into our
050health insurance after a certain number of days or anything like that? So it depends. So subs are generally temporary employees. So we wouldn't offer benefits automatically. Now, if they have that as an added position, then they may be eligible based on their combined FTE. And then after a certain amount of time, if they've worked enough hours to qualify for health insurance per the Affordable Care Act, then yes, we would offer health insurance at that time. Most of our seasonal employees, they would fit into this. And Jackie, the things on this slide, Christine? Yes. So they can benefit. Great. Let's talk funding. Yeah, money. All right. Christine, if you wouldn't mind, could you skip forward two slides? I want to start with this one a little bit. But even before I get into that, I just
051wanted to sort of talk about our relationship here. So Justin and I, from a financial perspective, are just really happy that we have this really great partnership with Amanda and Christina. Obviously, this all costs some money. It's got a pretty big price tag to it. And we help with the financial impact and how to manage that. As you know, as part of our compensation, we've got salaries, we've got benefits. It all comes from the same pool of resources, ultimately. And so we try to balance that, and we help evaluate and analyze how much we can afford to put into benefits as relative to the amount that we add to salaries and compensation. And then also we assist with working with our benefits broker as we talk about rates. And Justin does some amazing modeling that
052helps us figure out the impacts to our operating funds that pay into these programs, as well as our self-insurance fund. And so I wanted to use that to pivot a little bit to talk about the mechanics of this, because it's slightly more complicated than simply we pay some money and we get health insurance for it. I'm going to stand because I like to stand and point. So one thing I wanted to highlight here is we have kind of this dual model for our health insurance. And what that is, we have on one side a self-insured model, which means that all of the risk and all of the premiums that go in, that goes into a separate fund on our accounts. And then all the claims that we're paying, like literally claims that we're paying to
053doctors and stuff, that comes right out of our accounts. We're writing checks to pay for those claims. And so the inflow and outflow, we're kind of our own insurance company on that side. And that's all happening over here on UMR Medical and Dental. So both Delta Dental and our UMR Choice and our UMR Direct Care Plans, those are all self-insured. And so every employee that participates in UMR and Delta, when they're contributing amount from their paycheck and the employee-er portion, the amount that we contribute, they get combined and they get sent over to another fund, our self-insurance fund, Fund 65. So when we're talking in the future about our Fund 65 and all that activity, that's exactly what this is. When I refer to that self-insurance fund, Fund 65, all the revenues in that fund
054are literally just premiums that are coming from all of our other funds that may have employees in them that are paying into these plans. Then all the expenses for those funds are claims, are all these health insurance and dental insurance claims. And that all happens for UMR and Dental. On Kaiser, Kaiser is fully insured. And so all of those premiums that are coming out of paychecks and out of the district's employee-er portion, all that gets sent, literally we write a check to Kaiser. We don't write a check, we electronic transfer, but we send it over to Kaiser every month. And those premiums go into the Kaiser's revenue, and then all of those claims, all those expenses for serving our Kaiser employees comes out of the Kaiser Bank account. So that's the fully insured model, and
055that means they manage all the risks, and they have to come back to us every year and say, look you guys, based on our expectations of where we thought your employees were going to utilize our services, we're a little hot, and so we need to increase your premiums this year. Or things are doing better, we outperformed a little bit, and we're not going to have to increase them as much, or maybe they went down once. Whereas our self-insurance plan is a little bit different. Our brokers, our Willis Towers Watson, our self-insurance plan, we're managing the up-down on that. And so if we do better compared to what we bring in for premiums versus what goes out in claims, we're going to actually increase our reserves in the self-insurance plan. And just like we have reserves
056in the general fund, we have reserves in the self-insurance plan, and that fluctuates based on the revenues versus expenditures in the self-insurance plan. So what that means, though, is that we can use those reserves to buffet volatility, the same way we can buffet volatility in the general fund. And so the self-insurance funding model does give us a lot more flexibility, but it does introduce a little bit more risk, because if things go really sideways, we're responsible for handling that. Now, luckily, we do have a backstop called stop-loss insurance, individual and aggregate stop-loss insurance, so that if claims really do run fully away from us, we actually do another claim with our stop-loss insurer, and we get some of that back. So we're not fully running away with really, really large claimants. We did have a
057really large claimant last year. Last year, it was $7 million for one individual that really ran away. But that was on our self-insurance plan. Without stop-loss insurance, we would have had to incur the entirety of that amount. Instead, it was only about $200,000, I believe, that we had to pay for that individual. So with that, I want to make sure you understood that mechanism and how that works, because that will help frame a little bit of some of the cost information that I'm about to give you. I see you may have... Did you have some of that? Sorry, I'm working on reading his body language. Sometimes he wants to chime in. Do you have some? I was ready. I wanted to make sure you covered the stop-loss. Oh, thanks. We were bearing all of this.
058You read the body language, right? Thanks, Justin. And we work closely with Willis Towers Watson, our benefits broker, with our self-insurance plan to make sure that we're in legal compliance with any change in legislation. And they bring that as part of their role to our attention, because those are one of the risks. If we're out of compliance, that would be on the district. So we are able to stay into compliance and limit those risks by working closely with them as well. Thank you. And one other point on that is that just the same way Kaiser comes back to us and says, well, we need to increase your premiums by 8% or 10% or 12%, Willis Towers Watson will come and say, in a similar fashion, based on your experience, we think you need to increase
059your premiums for your self-insurance plan by 8% or 10% or 12%. But the thing is, is based on our level of how much we have in reserves and how much we want to build in maybe a spend down, how much we want to buff it or protect our employees from those increases, we can just say, okay, well, thanks for the recommendation, but we're not going to increase it that much. Or maybe we have a structural spend down from a previous year that we need to make up for, and they say, well, your increase needs to be 10%. We're like, well, we need to go up 11% because we have a spend down that we built in from previous years that we have to make up for. Those kinds of decisions we have to make with
060Willis Towers Watson and some of the modeling that Justin does. So I'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But before I go on to that, any other thoughts before I give some numbers? And it's a balance between your utilization. So how many employees and their family members on the plan are utilizing it and there's a target percentage. And if it's overly utilized or the claims are too high, then that can drive the costs as well. And that's also looking at making sure employees know the steps to take to utilize their insurance plan for a health condition. For example, using urgent care, if you can, versus a hospital. It's all about mitigating costs and helping our employees get the health care that they need that all impact that renewal rate. Let me pop
061back two slides, exactly. So this is just a quick summary of what it costs for our various benefits that we provide our employees. Now, this is all operating funds. So again, General Fund is by far the largest. We talk about General Fund all the time. Remember, we have salaries and benefits coming out of Fund 23, our Student Activities Fund, our Community Ed Fund, all of our community schools program managers and all those child care leaders are coming out of community schools. We have a Nutrition Services Fund. All of those Nutrition Services workers come out of Nutrition Services Fund. So we have a lot of other funds that pay for salaries and benefits. So all of those funds are actually contributing to our self-insurance plan or to Kaiser, if they're a Kaiser employee. And so that's
062why this says operating funds, not just General Fund, because all of this has to go towards paying for our benefits. So what you can see here is for our big, broad swap here, operating funds, you can see salaries and benefits is about 78% total. Now, I know we always talk about 85% salaries and benefits for General Fund, and that's true. But when you wrap in all of our other funds, it goes down just a little bit, because the other funds have a larger percentage of non-salary benefits expenditures. So when you aggregate them all together, it ticks down just a little bit. So you can see 19% of our spend district-wide for our operating funds is benefits. Now, the vast majority of that is PARA. So we're north of $60 million a year for the employer
063portion, which is 21.4%, I believe, of base salary or, excuse me, of PARA eligible salary for every employee in the district every month. So we pay it to PARA, 21.4%. That is a pretty large number, and that's what's adding up to this PARA now, $60 million. But health insurance is also nothing to shake a stick at. This is a pretty large amount, north of $32 million or so. Now, that represents the employee, excuse me, the employer portion of health insurance. Because remember, our employees also contribute an amount based on the selection that they've chosen, their tier, the health plan that they've picked as well as the tier that they've picked will determine how much they have to contribute to their premium as well. So our portion is about $32 million total for both Kaiser and
064UMR combined. Then the employee portion, excuse me, not more than that, adds on a little bit more to get to the total amount that we pay into those, and I'll show you that in the next slide. Medicare, that's 1.45%, and then dental is a pretty small amount. I don't know what the amount is, but that's on the next slide. So would you mind skipping? Of which are employee premiums, so if I'm an employee only and I'm purchasing health care, for the health care plan it's as low as $51 a month. That's right. So for health insurance, employee only, $51 a month. That's really good. And on dental, we have two plans on dental, and the dental basic plan, it's free. There's no charge for dental for employee only, right? Yep. All right, so let's talk
065about some numbers. So remember I was talking about $32 million on the other slide, that health bar, $32 million. The employees total, when their contribution adds up to about $8 million a year. So total in both UMR and Kaiser, we're about $40 million that we're sending to either the self-insurance fund or Kaiser in total. So this is our budget, that's our budgeted amount for health insurance. This is the employee portion that we deduct from paychecks, and then that's the total amount. And so I would like to highlight this number, because this 80-20 is pretty good, right? We are bearing 80% of the burden of health insurance costs for employees. So that's a laudable number. It would be great if we could do 100, but it would be expensive. Which I believe from a district comparison,
066we are higher. We contribute a higher percentage than the average school district. And again, this is aggregate. So one individual, depending on which plan they pick and which tier they pick, that percentage may be up or down. It's not 80-20 for every employee. That's an aggregate number in total. And the reason why is because the number is greater for our employee-only portion. We charge so little for the employee-only portion. And if you remember, the participation, the 65% participation on the employee-only portion out of all of our participants, so that's heavily favored towards that amount. So yeah, Amanda mentioned this, 51 is the lowest. I think 55, 55, something like that is the highest for employee-only premiums. And then it goes up from there. So if you need to insure your spouse or your kids or
067your family, we do charge a larger amount for health insurance. For dental, the amounts are all much smaller. So the entirety of the program is $2.29. We're at .99. I know this isn't 80-20. It was just when I was talking about the rule. What if someone asks? Well, I'm going to be prepared to answer the question anyway. Because dental is a different animal. It's a very simple program. There's not a lot of plan design changes that we're making. We don't make premium changes. We don't have multiple providers. We only have one provider, two plans. And the basic plan, like you said, is free for employees. And so what we have is very sort of a rigid structure where we just contribute the same amount for every tier. Is that right? Same amount for every tier.
068And so in doing so, we come out with this result. But again, I think the maximum amount employee plus family for dental on the highest plan is like $77 a month, something like that. So dental is not too much. But I did want to at least compare the two. Less expensive, more predictable, like you mentioned down there. And then a free premium, no premium for employees. What do we have, I think, further on this? Is there another slide? Do we have another slide for finance? There might be one. Could I? Oh, yeah, this one. Can I add one? Sorry. Yeah, please. I have a great structure. You know, we talk about that 80-20. And as Tony mentioned, it's not all equal. So an employee only, we cover the vast majority. The employee only pays maybe
069$50, $55. So that's obviously much more than 80%. I'm really proud. I like what we do. It's a philosophical decision. So when you think about employees with children or a spouse or maybe more importantly, with a family, we could say, well, we're just going to give you the same amount. So every employee gets the same amount. But we do cover a little bit more for families. And that's sort of a philosophical decision. But I think the opposite option, which a lot of districts do, is they just put in that flat amount. And we've seen it happen. It makes health care coverage for families untenable. You know, you're now into the $2,000 range where you have to raise premiums that much. And so I think it's, I'm really proud of that, that we're willing to contribute
070just a little bit more. It's not like we cover, it's still pretty expensive. You know, nobody's going to lie about that. But it's significantly better than it could be. And at the same time, we're really cognizant of the co-pays, out-of-pocket maximums, those prices that the employees experience when they use their program. And we are very comparable and very reasonable and fairly low cost for all of those pays. I think we have a couple, two slides left. Yeah, that's right. I did want to talk about this renewal. This is great. So like we talked about earlier, Willis Terrace Watson comes in and does this actuarial analysis for us. And they say, well, okay, we think that you need to increase by 8.3 percent or 5 percent or whatever. And then what we do is we look
071into our models and say, okay, well, if we were to do that, how is that going to impact the general fund or the rest of our funds that have to bear the employer portion of the increase? And also, what's it going to do to employ e-premiums? What are the employees going to have to do? So we do a lot of work. And like I said, Justin has some great models and helped us. We've been in rooms for hours tweaking and talking and said, okay, what's going to happen there? What's going to do this? How are these people going to be impacted? And so that's the real work, and that's why I take a lot of pride and really am excited that we work so well together with HR on doing this. In addition, last year
072we did something unprecedented, which was we held all employee premiums flat. So we did not pass on any of the employee, excuse me, any of the premium increase onto the employees. We 100% took that for that cost on the district side. That was really difficult, and what we had to do in order to accommodate that is use some of those reserves that I was talking about earlier from the stock insurance plan. And so, but what that does is, as we talked about previously every time that we do this and we have a plan spent out, is we have to dig out of it a little bit, right, in the future year. We have to catch up a little bit. And so unfortunately we couldn't pass on full zero dollar increases to employees this year. We
073still are using some of our reserves. So last year we projected to be using about $3 million of those self-insurance reserves. I think that self-insurance plan is at $14 million, I think I recall. And so we were able to utilize that reserve to hold those employees' premiums flat. This year we reduced that spend down to two from three. Again, we were able to bear that. And then again, in future years we're going to return again to an expected revenues equals expected, budgeted revenues equals expected share of that. And so again, we're using $2.8 million of self-insurance reserves for this next year. You know what the most fun part of this is? Is that our fiscal year goes from July to June of every year. Our insurance plan years go from January to December. So we
074get the fun, enviable task of having to budget half of the end of last year and half of the beginning of the next year in our fiscal year budget every year. There's this six-month crossover between the two. So it's a fun thing. And so what I'm saying is that this number, it's an estimate, it's approximate, it's an amalgamation of multiple years and stuff, but we're keeping an eye on it and how these premium increases that both the employer and the employee bear impact our reserves in our Fund 65. But we're doing fine and we're happy to be able to use those reserves to help hold employees as harmless as we can in the various increases that we incur for health care costs. Health care costs are just going up. They're going mad, as we all
075know. And Tony, as a result of passing on a little bit of the increase, again, reinforcing we did not change any plan designs or structures or copays. They were all added, like reducing the copay for mental health. That's a great note because when we did hold employees harmless last year with no premium increase, there were some plan design changes. That's right. All right, so with that context, let's talk about Kaiser, because they're fully insured, right? So there's no reserve that we can tap. So Kaiser comes and says, we want to increase your rates by 18 percent. And Amanda and I were just like, okay, that's a big amount. That's a really big amount for us to try to either absorb 80 percent of on the district side and ask our employees to absorb 20 percent
076of. That's a large chunk. And so Will Serves Watson, our broker, re-approached them, got it down to 15, which was great. And I'm curious now because if they came out with 18, why can they go down to 15 so easily? Like, what's going on with the books behind the scenes on Kaiser's side? But fortunately, that's the nature of the business, because when you are fully insured, you are at the mercy of the company, and you don't really have as much insight as to what's going on behind the scenes versus the fully insured plan, which is our show, right? But we were able to work with Kaiser. And again, without changing plan design, we approached them. Amanda and I really worked hard with them. We wanted to improve our relationship with them. And, you know, as
077Christina mentioned, there's been some attrition on the Kaiser side. It's been sort of stepping down every year. And it's been, you know, not as much interest in it. And Kaiser's kind of taken note and stuff. And so we worked with them pretty aggressively, saying, hey, we would like to ensure our Kaiser participation is robust, but we're not going to do it at 18 percent. So we want you guys to invest also in our program, just like we're going to, as partners who are going to work on Kaiser participation. And so we got them down to 11 percent, which was really great, and an unprecedented multi-year rate guarantee, which means they're not going to increase future years by a certain amount. I think it's 11 next year and 13 the following year. So we got two
078multi-year rate guarantees years after that. And so, again, something that really excited that we were able to work with them on and, you know, go to bat for our employees, go to bat for our programming, and make sure that, you know, we were offering a good Kaiser option for our employees as well. With opportunity for Kaiser to come to the table and enhance offerings and plan design structures, and potentially another even more less expensive plan design. So there's a couple of things on the horizon that we're looking at. Down the road, you know, like we talked about, I would love to fix this plan year versus fiscal year thing. That's a burn to my saddle. That's, you know, that's a huge thing to change. So that's, you know, maybe something we could look at. And
079like Amanda said, maybe potentially looking at our plan offerings for Kaiser, because right now we just have one Kaiser offering, and be able to offer another tier I think would be an attractive option for our employees. Can I ask something about that? Yeah. I'm not as familiar with self-insured plans, but isn't part of what makes those work that like there's more people to contribute to it and then kind of offsets the claims? So if we have multiple options of Kaiser, then that takes people away from the self-insured plan? Or am I not totally understanding that? It can, even with a fully insured plan, it can do the same thing. So the risk that you have with your smaller group of individuals on any given plan is greater the smaller number of individuals on the plan
080versus you have a lot. It's about risk diversification. If we don't incentivize people to use, if too many people shift to the self-insured, then we risk losing a second option. Because a insurance provider really does not want to probably negotiate with us when so few employees. Thank you. Yeah, Kaiser really would literally back out if their numbers got so small. And the strategy is that we want to offer more options. And in working with Christina and our also Willis Towers Watson, a healthier balance is closer to a 50-50 amongst the plans, the two kinds of major plans. And really in closing with planning for the future, as Tony shared, we do have a desire and a need to move to have our plan year reflect our school year. And most districts have the July 1
081to June 30 plan renewal. And that better aligns with our ability to budget as well. So in the future, we're looking at doing that and working with our benefit broker internally to determine what that means. And so we're walking that out very carefully as we start into next semester to plan for future years. And as we shared, we're looking at exploring other medical plans, looking at through our future benefit survey for our employees, seeing what other things we need to do to enhance, like adding potential voluntary benefits at a low cost, such as hospital indemnity. If you know that you're going to have a surgery, enrolling in a voluntary benefit like that can help reduce your cost. There's a whole spectrum of voluntary benefits that could be offered, but we want to make sure it
082matches what our employees need and want as well. And we'll continue to gather employee feedback and look at our plan designs very carefully, along with ensuring that our benefit strategy is again focused on monitoring the claims, the costs, our plan structure, and our employee life. One of the benefits that I haven't used because I have full incident insurance, and so I have one break of toe on each foot this year, one year. Yeah. So something like that I know for employees who have family members, sports, or it doesn't have to be sports, but I think you can use those. Those are really good options that help. Thank you. I've seen people ask about pet insurance, so there's a full spectrum of lots of opportunities that we'll present to our employees. I have one quick question.
083When you say aligning the benefits year with the school year, does that mean that they will start their benefits outside of the traditional January time, if we change that around? So where everybody else tends to start benefits at the beginning of the year, they'll start in the middle of the year or something? How does that look? So businesses tend to have the January to December timeline. Most school districts have July 1 to June. There wouldn't be a gap in any kind of coverage or insurance for employees. It would shift when open enrollment occurred, and then when the new benefits would be in effect. Okay. So they wouldn't have the traditional January start? Yeah, so things like deductibles would start over on July 1 instead of January 1, so there would be communication around how that
084works. The other nice benefit is that premiums don't shift for employees mid-year. Right now, because our new plan year starts in January, the premiums change in January as well, and so employee paychecks adjust mid-year in order to accommodate that. Whereas if we have a plan year that aligns with the fiscal year, the premiums remain consistent throughout their entire school year. In alignment with any pay increases as well at that same time. Do you all consider or do you have on your horizon any of the public entity insurance pools or purchasing alliances? That has come up over the years in conversation of any kind of statewide type endeavor. We are keeping our ear to the ground to see what conversations are out there, and then what benefit and what risk that would mean as well. There
085are definite benefits to things like that, and then we just have a lot of questions in relation to how that works from a claims perspective and what that means for each school district, so we're continuing to monitor any opportunity for that. There are some talks statewide that in order to drive costs down for health benefits that getting all school districts on one insurer would give a lot of leverage around driving costs down. It would take choice away, which people love choice, but it could be lucrative enough that people would be incentivized to do it. The biggest issue with it is that the minute there is an agreement to do that, insurance providers will start trying, you have to have the largest districts all in, in order for the rural to all benefit. And once an
086agreement is made that that's the way we're going to go as a state, the largest districts will begin to be incentivized by insurance providers to peck them off and to pull them out of that pool. And so if we go this route as a state, people are going to have to be very seriously about staying in, in order to see the benefits. It would be one way to leverage against the rising costs of health insurance. And increase the risk pool. You have way more people participating, more people contributing. But you can imagine what rural school districts deal with in terms of health care costs. And they really have no leverage unless they pool with other BOCES or districts. And even that is still difficult. Ironically, I think right now there's a group in Oregon visiting
087from CASE, CASB, and CEA. I know a couple of the folks that are going out there. But it's just to explore it. So Oregon has done it, Washington has done it. I think Nebraska has done it. South Carolina made it. Light years away from determining what it might look like, right? But I know in Oregon it's compulsory. So it's not an option to your point, Jackie. Not all states do it that way. So it might be interesting. I'm looking to see what medical providers would... I think that's all we have for you. Unless you have any questions. Thank you so much. I will entertain a moment of motion. To adjourn. All in favor? Aye.