Dear Editor,
All efforts were made to acquire the OACSD superintendent’s corrections or comments should anything here be false, a half-truth, or misrepresented. No comment whatsoever was received. Deja vu, this is more wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive than the 2008 OAEA healthcare giveaway program or the hidden salary inflator provisions of the 2011 OATA contracts.
Now, buried deeper than before, within a Rube Goldberg contraption wrapped in a Gordian Knot of misdirections, there is another stick it to you. Your property taxes are paying OACSD employees to enroll in a healthcare insurance plan. OACSD employees net an end of year profit. An individual and family plan costs $9,000 and $26,000, respectively. And they pay nothing.
Under a new contract, beginning July 1, 2021, your then Board of Education and Superintendent began paying OACSD employees to enroll in a High Deductible Healthcare Plan. This contract was retroactively approved eight months later. This was a fake approval because it was never on the BOE’s agenda. It was illegal for the BOE to approve a contract that was not a part of the public record!
If you try to read ARTICLE 7 INSURANCE of the current OACSD OATA teachers’ contract together with the Summary of Benefits, you will understand. However, you will need to flowchart it and figure out the math.
The following two contracts were never contained in the BOE’s agenda. All contracts remain unsigned to this day. These unapproved contracts amount to about $160,000,000. Additionally, the Superintendent and then President of the BOE ensured these contracts were never reviewed by the district’s attorney. This was accomplished by breach of public law and intentional deception. The HDHP was nothing of the sort. Within the contracts is a Rube Goldberg contraption wrapped in a Gordian knot.
I hope you see all the things the New BOE has to address. Besides fixing the contracts, the old budget development needs to be burned down and rebuilt from the ground up. Last year’s property tax increase of $358,000 was built on selectively omitted information. Year-end 2024 OACSD underran the budget by $3.6M.
Today’s bloated reserves exist to pay for the future healthcare insurance overruns. As of June 1, 2024 the healthcare insurance reserve was $3.7M and the plan was to go to $5M. You are paying around $1.8M annually for OACSD employees to sign up for the High Deceptive Healthcare Plan.
This is too crazy to be false. The illegal morning meetings began on March 22, 2021. The video recordings of BOE meetings prior to Nov. 16, 2023 seems to have disappeared. The money is for the children, right?
What is being pulled here is exactly what led us to the years 2011 -2016 of taxation by extortion. Due to not enough tax money, we, the BOE, are going to have to fire one of OACSD’s best and brightest teachers. We won’t manage costs, as that would expose the Board of Effluent Living. That’s chutzpah!
Nothing is wrong with a fair and reasonable agreement between OACSD and OACSD’s unions; “It’s for the children.”
Sincerely,
Haig McNamee
Owego, N.Y.
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