A new three-year contract agreement between the Board of Education and the Westbrook Education Association (WEA) reached in December 2017 will go into effect on July 1, 2018, the start of the next fiscal year. For teachers, the first year of the new contract will mean wage step advancement and general wage increases (GWI). School business manager Lesley Wysocki said that the contract would increase wages overall by 3.14 percent; this amount includes the impact of both step changes and GWI.

The new contract’s wage schedule, like the current one, has 12 steps. To reach the top and 12th step, a teacher has to teach in the Westbrook schools for 18 years. Under the contract, a teacher with a master’s degree and one- to three years of experience would earn $49,922 in the agreement’s first year and a teacher with a master’s degree and 18 or more years would earn $85,904 in the first year.

The new contract’s health insurance provisions are intended to offer incentives for employees to migrate to a High Deductible Health Plan/Health Savings Account (HSA) as the preferred plan. While teachers can remain in a Preferred Provider Plan (PPO), to do so they have to pay 100 percent of the difference between the cost of an HDHP plan and a PPO plan. The premium charges of an HDHP plan are lower than that of a PPO plan for both the employee and the employer.

Employees choosing the HDHP plan pay 20 percent of the premium as their cost-share. Of the plan’s $2,000 (individual)/$4,000 (family) annual deductible, the district covers 50 percent of the cost. Prescription drug coverage in the contract for the PPO plan carries a $4,000 annual spending cap while the HDHP prescription drug coverage has no annual cap.

All Connecticut teachers however face a new cost burden. The state budget deal signed into law in Oct. 2017 requires that teachers must contribute an extra one percent of their annual salary to the state’s Teacher Retirement Board to offset future pension costs. Starting on Jan. 1, 2018, teachers must contribute seven percent of their salary to TRB instead of the prior six percent.

A big driver of most town and school budgets are the fixed costs of negotiated agreements that commit the town to pay wages and benefits to members of those bargaining units. As the town’s finance board starts its budget workshops, the contract terms of those negotiated contracts are central to the fixed costs on which the town’s budgets are built.