HEA's Proposed Retirement Incentive

Members: As per our CBA, if you have 20 years teaching with the district, and you would like to take advantage of either benefit option in the CBA (2.9), you need to put in a letter of retirement to the district by January 15, 2022. If you are planning to retire in June of 2022 (this school year), you can take option 1 and receive $9,000 in termination pay, along with 1/4 of your accumulated leave. If you plan to retire in June of 2023 (next school year) you can take option 1 as described above, or take option 2, which is a $5,000 stipend this year (not included in termination pay) and $7,000 next year in termination pay, along with 1/4 of your accumulated leave. (If you do not have 20 years in the district you can, of course, still retire, you just don't have to worry about this deadline!) NOTE: HEA has proposed a retirement incentive to the district. This is in addition to the benefit already provided by the CBA. This proposal is NOT limited to those teachers with 20 years in our district. Our proposal included:

• Three year rolling incentive, 2022, 2023, 2024

• Thirty teachers total in those three years

• $22,500.00 in incentive pay

• Based first on salary step, how long on step, seniority, and then time/date of notification

• Move the retirement notification date to February 25, 2022

The district did have some hard parameters: they will not consider health insurance as being part of the incentive, and they will not consider the same amount of money or as many teachers as we had two years ago. The district has indicated that they are going to make a counterproposal and need to do a cost out. This means that we will not be able to continue this negotiation until after the start of the new year. This probably raises more questions than it answers. This email contains all the information that the bargaining team has at this time. Our suggestion: as you consider your retirement options, know that there will probably be something on the table, BUT it may not be three years, it may not be this amount of money, it may not be this many teachers. I know that this is not super helpful, but I wanted to make sure that everyone is aware of what the bargaining team is working towards. Please direct any questions to Jane Shawn at (jshawn@helenaschools.org) or (jshawnhea@gmail.com). Thank you, HEA Bargaining Team Jane Shawn, Anna Alger, Adam Clinch, Joanne Didriksen, Kelly Elder,

Bob Korizek, Erika McMillin, Paul Phillips, Jonna Schwartz, Jake Warner