School District Exempt Employee Contract Includes Changes to Health Plan and Overtime

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Exempt employees in the Kodiak Island Borough School District may be close to reaching a new contract agreement.

The exempt category includes assistants or those in the central office who may have conflicts of interest if they were to join district associations, which are similar to unions. The school district school board went over the contract changes at its work session Monday night.

Sandy Daws, school district business manager, said one of the bigger changes is to overtime.

Under the draft agreement, an employee only gets overtime for exceeding 40 hours a week or 8 hours a day. Daws said, for instance, if a person takes a holiday on a weekday and gets called in the same day, it doesn’t count as overtime, but rather as regular time and holiday time. In the former contract, she explains, they would have received overtime for that day.

The contract also encourages employees to sign up for the high deductible health plan instead of the standard plan by offering incentives. For examples, the district will deposit $750 into an employee’s Health Savings Account when they transition from the standard plan to the high deductible health plan.

Daws said they still have some last changes to do on the wording of the contract, but other than that it will be ready to move forward.

The school district had also been negotiating a contract with the Kodiak Island Educational Support Association, or KIESA. At the work session, Daws said that is currently “back at the table.”