Health insurance forcing teachers to retire

George Appleton, Las Vegas

Saturday, July 19, 2008 | 2:03 a.m.

In Monday’s Las Vegas Sun there was a story by Emily Richmond to the effect that the Clark County School District is in no hurry to fill all of the 700 vacant teaching positions our schools and our kids will face in the fall.

Part of the reason there could be 700 “missing” teachers is that a fair number of experienced, older teachers — including my sister-in-law — will be retiring this summer, many of them one to five years earlier than they would like to retire, for the simple reason that the moment they retire, the Teachers Health Trust will throw them out, and as of Sept. 1 the Nevada Public Employees’ Benefit Program will no longer take teachers in, leaving them with basically no health insurance plan.

My wife and I were lucky. Several years after we retired, there was an “information meeting” for those who had retired, and we were tossed out of the Teachers Health Trust with the thought that “we hope you can find something good.” The Public Employees’ Benefit Program stepped up and took us in, and it’s good health insurance — but it can’t afford to keep taking in people who haven’t paid into the plan while they were working.

The solution is simple, and might well keep some of those experienced people here teaching your kids: The Clark County School Board must, before the end of September, take all active teachers from the Teachers Health Trust and put them under the state Public Employees’ Benefit Program.

It won’t matter to those new teachers who are going to stay only three or four years to get some experience and then move away — but it matters a lot to the people who have taught your children (and maybe some of you) for the past 25 or 30 years.