The New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School board is looking to offer incentives to get administrators and teachers to retire.

At Monday night’s school board meeting, the board unanimously approved an incentive package for central office administrators who qualify for retirement, thus being 55 or older and having 30 years of service.

That came after the board narrowly shot down a motion that would bring in a company to help come up with a retirement incentive for teachers, as well as figure out how much it would really save the corporation.

The Indianapolis group, Educational Services Company, did work with Superintendent Bruce Hibbard’s prior school corporation, where he was the assistant superintendent. He said the company helped the district save hundreds of thousands of dollars with finding the best deal with health insurance.

He said he’d like to bring them back to have someone from outside the district giving unbiased advice as well as the talents of actuaries, since retired teachers can use the district’s health insurance until they turn 65.

Hibbard said if approved, the company would help create a retirement incentive that would ultimately have to be approved by the teachers’ association prior to it being offered to teachers.

“We’d have solid numbers and another set of eyes coming to the table. It’s about trusting the numbers, because we don’t want to do anything that would be unfair to [teachers] as well,” Hibbard said after the meeting.

According to the proposed contract, Educational Services would get $200 an hour, with an estimated grand total between $3,500 and $4,500. The contract also states that overnight accommodations, mileage, meals and more are additional expenses if incurred.

The vote was 4-3 against the contract, with Lee Ann Wiseheart, Jim Zoeller, Patricia Badger-Byrd and Rebecca Gardenour voting against. Neal Smith, Don Sakel and Roger Whaley, board president, voted in favor.

“We’re going to be in for some very hard times,” Sakel said of the district’s impending cost reduction plan of $3 million over the next two years. “I hate to lose the veteran teachers, but I think we need to do everything we can to help the budget out and I think this would be a way in doing this.”

Some of the reasons for the no votes were due to the extra expenses, possibly being able to do the same with current administrators and the termination clause in the contract that did not allow NA-FC to cancel at any time, like it allowed the company to do.

Zoeller said the latter is the only thing holding him back from a yes vote.

Deputy Superintendent Brad Snyder said he would see if the company would allow the same wording for the school district and bring back an updated contract to the board at it’s Dec. 16 meeting.

Hibbard said he’s unsure of how many teachers he’d like to take the district up on a retirement incentive. He said he’s needing the company to come in and find out how much can really be saved.

As for the administrator incentives, Hibbard said he believes six people at the central office qualify to retire now.

“The nice thing about this is that it’s totally up to them. This is totally voluntary on their part and we’re just going to offer it and see if some of them take it,” Hibbard said. “Honestly, what it does, it does two things for me. One of them, it honors their service and provides them an incentive to retire if they were thinking about it and secondly what it’ll do for the district is that I won’t rehire all the positions that may leave. If four people would take us up on it and we only replaced two, that’s two big salaries that we wouldn’t replace.”

He said no administrative layoffs are in the works. However, he said sometime between January and March the administration will have to come up with an expenditure reduction plan that would cut $3 million out of the district’s budget over the next two years and a lot of things will be considered to help reach that number.