Restoring State Funding, For State Mandated Costs

If you’ve been following my posts about the Bibb County School District budget, you’ve seen me talk a lot about millage rates, reserve funds, and tough trade-offs. But there’s a piece of the puzzle that almost never makes the headlines, and it might be the single biggest state-level pressure on local school budgets:

Health insurance for our classified school employees, the support staff who keep our schools running.

Bus drivers. Custodians. Paraprofessionals. Nutrition workers. Front office teams.

The short version of this story is simple and frustrating:

• Until about a decade ago, the State of Georgia helped pay the employer share of health insurance for these workers.
• In 2012, the state stopped doing that for non-certified employees, pushing the full cost onto local districts.
• Since then, the cost of the State Health Benefit Plan (SHBP) has climbed sharply, and districts like Bibb have had to eat every dollar of those increases for classified staff.

That decision is still shaping our local budget today. With the General Assembly set to reconvene in January (the state constitutionally meets on the second Monday in January each year), this feels like the right time to lay out what’s going on, why it matters, and what we can do about it.

A state decision with big local consequences

Let’s start with the “who.”

Classified school employees include:

• Bus drivers and monitors
• Custodians and maintenance staff
• Paraprofessionals in classrooms and special education
• School nutrition workers
• Front office and clerical staff

They don’t show up in test score charts, but nothing else works without them. No buses, no clean buildings, no meals, no functioning front office.

For years, the deal was straightforward: these employees were in the State Health Benefit Plan (SHBP), and the state helped cover the employer contribution for their health insurance, just like it does for teachers.

Then came the Great Recession. To cut costs, Georgia started to reduce funding until it fully stopped funding SHBP for non-certified school employees in 2012, shifting the full employer share to local districts.

That wasn’t a temporary cut. It became the new normal.

Fast-forward to today: the bill keeps going up

Health-care costs didn’t stand still after 2012.

In recent budgets, the state has repeatedly raised the per-member-per-month (PMPM) employer contribution rate for SHBP:

• For the upcoming fiscal year, the rate for school personnel is increasing from $1,760 to $1,885 per employee per month, a 7% jump. The state is putting about $174 million into its own budget to cover that increase for state agencies and certified school employees.
• The Board of Community Health, which oversees SHBP, has formally approved $1,885 PMPM as the employer rate for both certified and non-certified school staff for FY 2026. The state will fund that increase for teachers and other certified employees, but local districts must pay the entire increase for non-certified employees out of local dollars.

Do the math:

$1,885 × 12 months = $22,620 per employee per year in employer health-insurance cost.

Every bus driver, every custodian, every parapro on the SHBP plan has that price tag attached, and because of the 2012 decision, local school systems pay 100% of it.

When we talk about Bibb’s budget being tight, or the board struggling over whether to roll back the millage rate, this is one of the big invisible drivers in the background.

What this looks like from a Bibb County seat

In earlier posts like “Empty Chairs and Big Decisions” and “Make Your Voice Heard on the FY2026 Budget,” I’ve written about sitting in a nearly empty boardroom while a handful of people made decisions that affect 20,000+ students and thousands of employees.

From that seat, here’s how this health-insurance issue looks:

• The district is responsible for hundreds of classified employees, drivers, aides, custodians, nutrition staff, and more.
• For each one on SHBP, Bibb has to budget over $22,000 a year just for the employer side of health insurance.
• Those dollars come before we talk about raises, literacy coordinators, truancy specialists, or classroom teachers.
• When SHBP rates go up, there’s no “off switch”, we don’t get to opt out or negotiate a different plan. We just get the bill.

It’s one of the reasons we see:

• Positions left unfilled
• Proposals for new support roles cut from final budgets
• Pressure to keep millage rates higher than people expect, even when property values are already climbing

And again, this is not a Bibb-only story. Districts across Georgia, especially in rural areas with weaker tax bases, are fighting the same battle.

This is already on the state’s radar

The good news: people at the state level are finally saying this out loud.

In November, the Georgia Department of Education released its 2026 legislative priorities. Alongside items like teacher raises and support for students in poverty, the department explicitly calls for the state to fund health insurance for classified (non-teaching) employees.

Superintendent Richard Woods has also talked publicly about the need to create a competitive state salary schedule for classified staff that includes health insurance, not just for teachers.

So this isn’t just a local activist idea. The people running the state’s own education agency are saying:

• Classified employees are essential to the educator workforce.
• We can’t recruit and retain them without solid benefits.
• The state needs to step up and help cover health-insurance costs again.

That’s an important shift, but for anything to change, the legislature has to act.

How much are we asking the state to do?

A fair question here is: “Okay, what would this actually cost?”

Based on public data:

• Current employer cost: $1,885 per member per month → $22,620 per year per employee.
• Independent analyses and district surveys suggest there are on the order of 80,000–90,000 non-certified school employees statewide who are eligible for SHBP.

Multiply those two numbers and you get something in the range of:

Roughly $1.8–$2.0 billion per year to fully restore state funding for health insurance for all classified school employees at current rates.

That’s a big number, no way around it. But it’s also important to keep it in context:

• Georgia’s total state budget is around $36 billion, with K-12 education as the largest single slice.
• The state is currently sitting on record surplus balances, roughly $11+ billion beyond its rainy-day fund, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

In other words: this is expensive, but it’s well within what the state can afford, especially as a phased-in commitment.

And remember, we are already paying this bill. Right now it’s just being paid by local school systems and property owners instead of the state.

Why this matters before the gavel falls in January

The Georgia General Assembly’s rules call for the legislature to convene on the second Monday in January each year.

That means a new session is just weeks away.

In a matter of days, lawmakers will be:

• Finalizing the FY 2026 budget
• Prioritizing which education issues get real funding
• Deciding whether GaDOE’s call to fund classified employee health insurance becomes more than a bullet point on a press release

By the time we get to next summer’s local budget hearings here in Bibb, most of the big state-level decisions that shape our options will already be locked in.

If we care about:

• Stable transportation
• Clean, safe school buildings
• Enough parapros in classrooms
• Reasonable property taxes

…then we can’t afford to wait until June to talk about a decision that will be made in February or March.

What you can do right now

You don’t need to be a policy expert to have a voice in this. Here are a few concrete steps:

1. Learn who represents you at the state level

Use the Georgia General Assembly’s “Find My Legislator” tool. Plug in your home address and it will show your:

• State Representative
• State Senator

These are the people who will vote on the budget and any bill involving SHBP or education funding.

2. Send a short, respectful message

It can be as simple as:

“I live in your district. I’m concerned about how local school systems are paying the full employer cost of health insurance for bus drivers, custodians, parapros, and other non-certified employees, while the state no longer helps cover those costs. The Georgia Department of Education has asked the legislature to fund classified employee health insurance. I’m asking you to support restoring state funding for this so our schools and local taxpayers aren’t carrying it alone.”

If you’re comfortable, mention whether you’re a parent, an employee, or a property owner, that context helps.

3. Keep showing up locally

State decisions don’t erase local responsibility. When the next round of budget hearings comes around in Bibb, we still need people in those seats, speaking into the microphone, asking how state health-insurance decisions are being handled in the local budget.

I’ve written before about the “empty chairs” problem at these hearings. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Closing thought

I care a lot about literacy, transparency, and how we prioritize spending in Bibb County, and I’ll keep writing about all of that. But none of those conversations happen in a vacuum. They happen in a budget that’s being squeezed by state-level decisions most people never hear about.

Health insurance for classified school employees isn’t a side issue. It’s one of the load-bearing beams holding up the entire system.

If we want better schools, we have to be willing to talk about the uncomfortable, expensive, unglamorous stuff, and we have to talk about it in time for the people under the Gold Dome to actually do something about it.

January is coming. Let’s not waste it.