Teacher tells board a decades-old insurance loan left teachers paying the price

At the public-comment portion of the meeting, teacher Jared Stumpf urged the board to address what he described as a nearly decade-old, $725,000 loan on the district's books tied to the self-funded health insurance plan and argued that teachers have paid a portion of the cost.

“Every teacher has paid their debt to this bill over and over,” Stumpf said, explaining that a 1% drop in teacher salary cost him “at least $692 a year over the last 9 years,” and he estimated he had paid “over $6,000 towards this deal.” He asked the board to restore trust by “simply write off this loan and remove it from our district's balance sheet.”

Stumpf traced the issue to negotiations after 2017 and the district's use of interlocal funds and a bookkeeping treatment that he said obscures the true position of the insurance fund. He identified specific past references to the loan in prior meetings and requested a clear accounting and a remedy.

District staff did not provide a detailed reconciliation in the public record during the comment period. The claim remains unresolved in the meeting transcript; trustees thanked Stumpf for his remarks but did not make a substantive response on the loan reconciliation during open session.

Why it matters: Questions about long-standing accounting treatments for employee benefits affect staff trust, bargaining and compensation; trustees signaled interest in fiscal transparency but did not resolve the specific accounting issues in public session.

Next steps: Stumpf asked for the board to consider writing off the loan; staff and trustees did not announce a specific timeline during the meeting for investigating or responding to the request.