School board weighs health coverage for employees not covered by district plan

The Sidney School Board discussed the possibility of implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare” for some of its employees at its meeting Monday night.

The district is Conducting a study to discover how many of Sidney’s Public School Employees, who work over 30 hours a week and are not insured by the district, qualify for insurance under the provisions of Obamacare. Under the current insurance plan, Sidney Public Schools would have to offer some form of health insurance to those employees by September 1st, 2016.

“Under the current insurance structure, they could take the family insurance,” Superintendent Jay Ehler said. “But, they would have to pay the difference between the single and family plans.”

The biggest issue for the board is finding a way to insure those employees while staying under budget.

Blue Cross Blue Shield is also testing out a plan where the cost would benefit the employees and district.

“Blue Cross and Blue Shield has been experimenting with newer and cheaper plans,” Elher said. “They might have a higher deductible and the benefits might not be that good. Rather than $7,000 a year for a single plan, it would be $4,000 a year. I’ve been to two meetings with Blue Cross and Blue Shield and they’ve been trying to come up with a plan under PPACA guidelines that would cost the district and the person less.”

In other business on Monday, the board talked about concussion awareness. Coaches will have training videos and other text available to them to check for symptoms dealing with and identifying concussion-like symptoms.

Concussions are one of the hot button issues in sports today. Learning to spot these symptoms in youth sports has been an effort supported by a number of professional sports organizations. The board will suggest every coach watch and educate themselves on the items given to them so that they will properly know how to handle situations that involve concussions.

The board also approved the resignation of Sidney football coach and high school teacher Todd Ekhart, reading coach Kathy Nienhueser and third-grade math teacher Barb Higginson.

The board recognized the November “Student of the Month” award winners: McKenna Bergstrom, Johnny Hehnke, Kara Birner, Hannah Balandran, Bailey Brumbaugh and Brett McConnell.