Keeping Your Employees and Reputation Healthy

In our newsletter last week, we discussed how a review of your wellness policy supports development of healthy habits for your students. This week, we’d like to focus on a major way that you influence the healthy choices of your staff: your group health insurance purchasing policy. While thinking about the financial burden that healthcare brings may make your heart race, acquiring insurance for your staff may become an obligation as your school grows.

Your board may decide to go beyond mandates and provide health insurance while still a scrappy reformer shaping the future of education thirty kids at a time. Once you provide health insurance, the state wants to know your purchasing process meets their standards of competition. That includes a sealed proposal process, a simultaneous bid opening, and making key documentation and bids public data under the Government Data Practices Act. What’s more, this is one of the few policies where the state wants you to post the policy on your school website for public consumption.

If this just sounds like work for the sake of work, it might be, but requirements such as public health insurance policy posting keep your employees, your purchasing objectivity, and your reputation healthy! Better yet, as a publicly accountable body, the board ought to consider posting all but a few policies on its website to demonstrate to the community their commitment to accountability and due diligence. If you and your board might be a little embarrassed about the vintage of your policies, including group health insurance, act today! Resolve to make 2020 the year where you build a better relationship with your board, increase their accountability and engagement, and take control of your policy process. When you are ready to feel empowered, we are here to serve!