LETTERS TO LORI

Dear Ms. D’Amico

You have asked for information pertaining to the Lynn school district’s reporting of retired teachers’ health insurance.  I will attempt to address your questions as best I can.

Schedule 19 of the FY92 End of Year Pupil and Financial Report showed the budget for the Lynn Public Schools in FY93.  This FY93 budget was the basis for FY94 Chapter 70 net school spending requirement.  The Department currently possesses no end of year reports for FY92.  A copy of this report was mostly likely sent to the State archives, but even determining this would require an incredibly time-consuming search.  

Regardless of whether we can locate this report, schedule 19 for FY93 does not contain a separate line for districts to report retired teachers’ health insurance.  Had a district in FY93 nevertheless included that budgeted amount on its schedule 19 report, the District would have included the figure on lines 7060 and 7250, in the broad category: employee benefits (function 5100).  I’ve attached a .pdf file showing a blank template of schedule 19 from the FY92 report.  As you can see, acquiring Lynn’s FY92 end of year report would not necessarily contain the specific information you are looking for.  

Sometime after the submission of FY 92 end of year reports (perhaps in the Winter of 1995), Department staff surveyed school districts to determine whether retired teachers health insurance had been included on schedule 19 for FY93.  In response to this survey, Steve Upton, the business administrator for the Lynn Public Schools, wrote a letter to then-Commissioner Antonucci indicating that Lynn did not include this cost in its end of year financial reports.  A copy of this letter, dated March 1, 1995, is also attached to this letter, and the Department relies on this letter as evidence that Lynn excluded from its net school spending reports health insurance costs for retired employees. 

As I understand it, at around this time, the Massachusetts Legislature was considering a proposal to permit districts to recalculate their net school spending requirements by incorporating retired teachers health insurance costs.  This proposal did not pass.

Ultimately, aside from the attached letter, the Department possesses no record that documents or “states or proves Lynn did not meet the net school spending requirement for including retired teachers health insurance towards net school spending.”  Based on the Department’s survey, 127 districts including Lynn excluded retired teachers’ health insurance from their report of net school expenditures on the FY93 schedule 19.  Beginning in FY95, the Department began to track more closely on a separate line the costs associated with retired teachers’ health insurance, but, according to the terms of the state budget, still did not factor the health insurance costs into net-school spending calculations for these 127 districts.

I hope that this response addresses your questions.

Roger Hatch, Administrator

Office of School Finance

Mass. Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education

Josh Varon

Legal Counsel

MA Dept. of Elem. and Sec. Ed