Non-Full Time Employees Become Focus At School Committee Meeting

The Stoneham School Committee discussed job sharing and financial benefits among non-full time workers in the school district during their meeting Thursday night.

School Committee member Jeanne Craigie brought forth the issue after receiving a notice that 36 of the district’s 80 non-full time employees were sharing responsibilities in order to obtain 18 1/2 hours of work per week, the minimum required health insurance benefits for part-time hourly school employees in Stoneham.

Superintendent Les Olson informed Craigie that the number of non-full time employees receiving benefits was 16, and only one employee among the four that were job sharing had benefits. Craigie apologized for her error, but still continued to have concerns.

“Even at 16, and only four job sharing; I understand the law that if you have more than 18 1/2 hours, you’re allowed health insurance and I think we should take a look at expanding it to 23 hours,” Craigie said. “It’s not fair to the public to ask them to pay someone more for health insurance benefits than they make for a year’s salary.”

The confusion over the number of employees continued regarding the difficulty tracking them in terms of budgeting

“That’s what’s so hard, because you can’t track it in the budget book unless you know who they are,” Craigie said. “Because when you see a .2 (of a position) here and a .2 there, it’s a very difficult thing to track. My only concern is that half-time people receiving that benefit, we have to look very closely that they are doing the job.”

Olson then interjected again clarifying to Craigie that at least .6 of the full-time equivalency or FTE of a position was required for a salaried employee to obtain benefits and .7 of a position was required for an hourly employee, which also meant that the requirements for hourly employees already were at 21 hours a week (or .7 of a full position per week), and that changing the current formulas in place on how many hours some non-full time workers would significantly impact productivity in certain areas

“With the hourly employees it’s a question of having one person in there to do the job. You have one cook manager in there overseeing the menu in the cafeteria. So it might be a .8 position that qualifies for benefits, but you can’t reduce the number to two .4 positions and have the job effectively done,” Olson said. “And with, for example, speech therapists, we couldn’t find anyone that would be willing to work on a .4 FTE basis.”

The unevenness with the FTEs also made it difficult to turn the non-full time employees into full-time employees and then giving them benefits since doing so would create fractional workloads that would be left unfilled, such as in the case of the district’s speech therapists. Speech therapists typically work .6 FTE positions and cannot work a 1.2 FTE due to a lack of hours in the day or creating a 1.0 FTE position and a .2 FTE position because of a lack of qualified applicants that would accept the .2 position.

While the topic was left without any changes to benefits given to non-full time positions, the discussion may be revived at some point given the budgetary constrains currently facing the town.

“When we’re faced with $821,000 worth of cuts, I think it makes sense to look at different ways to operate,” Craigie said. “It doesn’t make sense to me to have anybody job sharing and receiving full benefits, it’s not something I agree with philosophically. It’s just wrong.”