Arlington school leaders have announced their timeline for negotiating new health-insurance agreements next year, hoping to avoid catching employees by surprise this time.
This time, school leaders are committed to “make sure everybody’s crystal clear” on the process, School Board member Mary Kadera said.
The current APS health-care contract with CareFirst runs through December 2026. Based on employee complaints about a poorly communicated switch in providers in late 2023, Superintendent Francisco Durán and staff began laying the groundwork for the upcoming process last year.
“We will continue to be transparent and keep everyone informed,” Durán said in outlining plans at a School Board meeting on Thursday.
A day earlier, the school system had issued a request for proposals from prospective health-insurance carriers. Responses are due by the end of November.
A joint task force composed of school officials and representatives from the Arlington Education Association (AEA) will then vet the submissions. They will be aided by a consultant hired by the school system.
Negotiations with health insurers will begin in the spring, with employees notified of final decisions no later than June. Impacted personnel will then have time to make coverage choices before the new insurance plans go into effect in January 2027.
Durán said it was possible the school system could go with a single provider, or split up the contract.
“It could be one, could be two, could be three,” he said.
AEA President June Prakash said her fingers are crossed for a good result coming out of the more transparent process.
“My hope is that employees will have a variety of comprehensive and affordable plans to choose from,” she told ARLnow.
AEA members and other school employees were caught by surprise by the switch from existing providers Kaiser Permanente and Cigna to CareFirst, announced in 2023. Concerns linger about whether the changes were in the best interests of the workforce.
“It was a major inconvenience for everyone to have to switch plans, and many employees had to terminate longstanding relationships with physicians,” Prakash said. “There are still concerns among employees about the healthcare rates, lack of availability of specialists and high medication costs.”
Kaiser Permanente had provided health-care coverage to Arlington school employees for more than three decades. For reasons that remain cloudy, the organization did not bid on the 2024-26 contract during 2023.
An internal audit conducted by the school system and released in May 2024 said turnover of key APS staff contributed to challenges during the contract-negotiation process. It also cited a lack of record-keeping within the school system’s Selection Advisory Committee, making it difficult to determine what actually transpired.
In the end, auditor Alice Blount-Fenney said Kaiser Permanente officials acknowledged they did not think the first request for proposal put out in 2023 applied to them, and somehow overlooked a second one that was sent out. The audit determined school officials had done nothing wrong by not following up to alert the health-care provider of the oversight.
“Vendors assume responsibility for any procurement related requests and responses. It is not ethically appropriate for APS to interfere with these decisions,” the audit concluded.
The school system’s cost of of medical and dental health-care premiums totaled $42.22 million in fiscal year 2025 and is expected to increase 1.6% to $49.91 million throughout FY 2026, school officials told ARLnow.