The Indiana Association of School Business Officials said many school districts have decided to reduce the hours for part-time employees rather than face the prospect of higher health insurance costs or fines, the Anderson, Ind., Herald-Bulletin reports.
In many Indiana schools, full-time employees like teachers receive healthcare benefits as part of their contracts, but part-time employees—bus drivers, coaches, teacher assistants, cafeteria workers—usually work less than 40 hours a week and wouldn’t normally receive benefits.
But under the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, or Obamacare, full-time workers are defined as employees who work at least 30 hours a week, which is a substantial change from how the state used to define the term. That automatically increased the number of school employees who are classified as full-time workers and must be provided with insurance under ACA.
If full-time workers don’t get health insurance, the corporation that employs them, here an Indiana school corporation, will have to pay a fine. The additional health insurance costs in several districts, though, are steep.
In the South Madison Community Schools, for instance, about 130 part-time employees would have been converted to full-time employees by the change in the definition. The district has a total annual budget of about $28 million, and school officials project an annual increase of about $1.2 million as a result. So what school officials have done there is reduce the number of hours those employees work to less than 30, which maintains their status as part-time employees.
This cutback, in turn, results in a drop in job satisfaction among part-time school employees, the paper reported. “I know that there has been a huge impact on part-time employers we hire,” the Herald-Bulletin quoted Chris Boots, president of South Madison Community Schools Board of Trustees, as saying. “We’ve had to cut their hours.”
By cutting back the hours to less than 30 per week, the schools no longer have to provide health insurance under the law, but of course, this also means those employees are getting less work. No employees were quoted in the article, though.