L.A. School Board Delays Vote on Health Benefits

Amid controversy over a proposal to insure domestic partners, the Los Angeles Board of Education postponed a vote on a broader benefits package Monday, raising the anger of employee union representatives.

Among the items swept into the one-month postponement were less controversial proposals on coverage for hearing aids, for surviving spouses of retirees and for birth control pills. Those enhancements would have been offered Jan. 1 to all Los Angeles Unified School District employees had the board approved them, while the domestic partners’ insurance was not scheduled to begin until 1998.

“We’re stunned and stymied. . . . It’s an affront to the employees who have acted in good faith,” said Bill Callahan, chairman of the health and welfare committee that spent nearly a year developing the benefits’ expansion proposal. Callahan is a staff member with the California Federation of Teachers, a statewide teacher union organization.

However, it was Callahan’s committee that on Monday recommended postponing the decision about domestic partners insurance, a week after board members raised questions. The committee had gambled that the compromise would persuade the board to approve the balance of the benefits.

Instead, the delay prompted Board President Jeff Horton, who is gay, to lead the movement against separating out the less controversial benefits. He said he could not “support any increase in benefits which does not include domestic partner benefits.”

Under the domestic partners proposal, both homosexual and heterosexual partners of district employees would be eligible for the health, dental and vision benefits now offered only to spouses.

The cost, estimated by an accounting firm, would be about $3.7 million a year, based on about 830 likely partners. The hearing aid coverage would cost about $4 million a year and birth control pills--already provided in all but one health plan--would cost about $270,000.

Although domestic partner coverage has been allowed in other local government agencies, including the county and city of Los Angeles, the suggestion drew fire from conservative critics of the school board. Many aimed their criticism at Horton.

“His fingerprints are all over this proposal,” said Eadie Gieb, whose organization--Parents and Students United of the San Fernando Valley--has previously opposed such district actions as distribution of condoms at high schools.

The health and welfare committee, which recommended the benefit additions, is composed of union and retiree representatives as part of a compromise negotiated with district administrators in 1993. It has more authority than other district committees: Its recommendations go directly to the board, without a requirement for district staff input, and the board can only adopt or reject them as they stand, not modify them.

That level of power prompted additional controversy Monday, with board member Barbara Boudreaux the most vociferous in her allegations that the teachers union wields undue influence over other labor organizations.