The Derby Board of Education Thursday unanimously approved an early retirement incentive plan for teachers at city schools.
Now the proposal is in the hands of the teachers union, the Derby Education Association.
“We are appreciative of the actions taken by the board tonight. We are certainly ready to discuss it, and hopefully do some business with it.” said Lou Coppola, the department head for science at Derby High School. “We will set a date — probably the week immediately following Thanksgiving. We will get together once we have it in writing, and we will discuss the proposal. Then we will get back to the board.”
Stephen Tracy, Superintendent of Schools, said he was happy the board passed the proposal, but realizes the long road ahead left for the board and the Derby Education Association to iron out the details.
“The board is very desirous of seeing if we can reach an agreement with the association,” Tracy said. “The reason they decided to vote tonight — we want the association to have a month or more to think about the proposal the board has made. If they see fit to ratify it, individual teachers need another month or more to think about their plans.”
Details
According to the Derby Board of Education’s proposal, those eligible for the incentive have to meet the following requirements: The teacher must be 60 or older, and completed 20 years of service in Connecticut; or the teacher can be of any age if he or she has completed 35 years of public school service, with 25 of those years spent teaching in Connecticut.
“We’ve been back and forth on this for several months, and I think the board made a good proposal. Now it is up to our colleagues in the association to see what they think,” Tracy said.
Teachers interested in retiring will have to notify the district by February 1, 2011. The incentives will include up to 70 sick days as well as a $50,000 payment, distributed over two to five years.
Derby teachers over the age of 65 who are a part of the Medicare Part A and B program, and decide to retire, will be reimbursed for Medicare, under the proposal.
The proposal also mentions a ‘Board of Education Option,’ which allows the board to reject or accept a retirement list in whole if there is less than five teachers opting for retirement.
“There’s a number of reasons teachers, boards and associations try to do this sort of thing. They want us to provide some additional incentive for teachers who have served the community for a long period of time, another is to save some money and a third is to save the jobs of younger teachers whose jobs may be on the line,” Tracy said. “We could face a tough budget and see that no one’s retired.”
Tracy expects the process to continue until at least February before anything will be put into motion.
