By Dave Lieber
watchdog@star-telegram.com
Retirement usually means that an employee stops working and starts a new phase of life, one that, for those lucky enough, includes a pension. But in Texas school districts, that's not always the case.
Some employees retire and then return as full-time or part-time employees, double dipping by collecting both their new salary and their pension.
In the Fort Worth school district, 193 employees who retired since 2005 have returned to work full time. An additional 17 have come back part time.
The practice is common enough in Texas that there's even a name for these returning employees -- retire/rehires.
But in contrast to Fort Worth schools, the Arlington district has only seven full-time retirees who have returned since 2005.
Salaries paid to these full-time employees who also collect retirement benefits are often not meager. According to records provided to The Watchdog under the state's open-records law, one retired Fort Worth special-education diagnostic evaluation specialist who returned to work in August earns $80,000 a year.
Twenty-four more retirees came back full time at more than $70,000 a year, including a band director, a counselor, a school psychologist and a data analyst. Five others who returned make more than $60,000 a year, including librarians at M.G. Ellis Elementary, Handley Middle and Polytechnic High.
Others returned as substitutes. Some part-time employees earn close to $200 a day as diagnosticians and music and math teachers.
Under current state law, it's impossible to know how much retirees receive in pension benefits.
State law changed last year for retirees wanting to come back full time. Under Senate Bill 1669, school employees who retired before Jan. 1, 2011, may now work full time for a school district with no loss of monthly pension annuity benefits, according to an explanation provided by the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. No work restrictions apply to these retirees.
For employees who retired after Jan. 1, 2011, restrictions do apply. They can work full time with no loss of monthly retirement benefits but only if they take "a complete break in service of 12 full consecutive calendar months after retirement." This break can't include work as a substitute or any part-time employment in a district.
Post-Jan. 1, 2011, retirees who return full time before the 12 months are up lose pension benefits for the month in which the full-time work occurs.
The new law eliminated an exception for workers who filled "acute shortage areas" and also principals and bus drivers.
Under the new law, anyone who retired after Jan. 1, 2011, can now return to work part time after a one-month break. That's what Keller administrator Vicki Burris did. I wrote about her in October, explaining how she retired in the spring from a $120,000-a-year top administrative job, took one month off and came back part time in summer at half her old salary. She continues to do most of her old job.
That example turns out to be the tip of the iceberg when compared with Fort Worth, where the practice is much more prevalent.
Double dipping in Texas received national attention recently when Gov. Rick Perry revealed in a financial disclosure statement that he officially retired a year ago so he could start taking his pension benefits early. He collects his $150,000 annual salary as governor and a monthly retirement annuity of $7,698 before taxes. That raises his gross annual salary to $242,000, according to the Texas Tribune.
Perry's plan is part of the state employee retirement system, which is different from the teacher retirement system. Rep. Kenneth Sheets, D-Dallas, introduced a bill that would have prevented a pensioner such as Perry from taking a job at the same classification from which he or she retired. His bill died in committee.
"When people retire, they should retire," Sheets told Bloomberg News last year.
Sheets told me last week that his bill would not have applied to educators because he saw a difference between state employees and school district workers. Unlike in a state job, he said, school districts are independent, and "local government has control over hiring." However, school districts are regulated in this matter by state law.
Some educators say bringing back retirees to their old jobs hurts employment opportunities for younger educators. Others say these retirees work in difficult situations or in areas where their expertise is sorely needed.
"We hire retirees when needed to work as substitutes or in high-need areas," Fort Worth schools spokeswoman Barbara Griffith said. "We're trying to utilize experience and expertise to answer the needs of our students."
Under the new law, "we must consider applicants who have retired from TRS just as we do recent college graduates. Prior law required we give preference to nonretirees, [but] the Legislature deleted that requirement from the code."
The state tries to discourage the practice by requiring school districts that rehire retirees to pay a pension surcharge equal to the sum of the member and state contributions on the compensation paid to the retiree. A health benefit surcharge is the difference between the cost to provide health benefit coverage and the premium paid by the retiree.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former chief economist at the Labor Department, is a critic of double dipping.
"It doesn't seem to make sense," she told me. "There should be a law against double dipping like that. If they want to do the job, why did they retire in the first place? Pensions are generous. I would think governments would want to do something about this."
Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice said: "It's a double-dipping loophole which is locking out new hires and helping to drain the state coffers. We think once you retire from a particular job and draw a pension from the state, you should not be able to return to that old job. From the governor on down, these are loopholes that should be closed."
Teacher Retirement System officials say they monitor any change in trends in the retirement patterns of members to address "the actuarial soundness of both the pension and the retiree health benefit plan."
One TRS report shows that as of August, the gap for the retirement program to cover its liabilities was $24 billion.
The Watchdog column appears Fridays and Sundays.Dave Lieber, 817-390-7043Twitter: @davelieber
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