NASHUA – A policy to prevent the school district from favoring former teachers who have retired from their jobs over other applicants is one step closer to taking effect in Nashua.

Still, one school board member thinks the policy doesn’t go far enough.

“My concern is that there will be people who retire after 20 years, and then, they’ll go on and do another 20 years,” said school board member Sandra Ziehm. “I would like to see us put that these cannot be people who are hired for careers.”

Despite Ziehm’s concerns, the school board’s human resources committee endorsed a draft of the school district’s policy on hiring retirees Tuesday night.

School board President Bob Hallowell said certain legal issues could arise if the policy did not follow state and federal discriminatory laws.

“If a retiree applies for a position and then we reject them, and you have a policy that says you’re not going to hire them, then we open ourselves up to a lawsuit,” Hallowell said. “I think this policy goes a long way to solving what little of a problem that I feel that we had.”

Ziehm said she wanted the policy to be altered and reworded to ensure that retirees would be hired only in cases of dire need, and they would not be eligible for any additional severance pay. She said hiring retirees would be an unnecessary raise of costs.

Human resources director Dana O’Gara suggested to Ziehm that hiring any employee, retiree or not, raises costs.

“We always try to find the best candidate for the job – a lot of times the new teachers we’re hiring are at the top of the scale, too.”

Superintendent of Schools Mark Conrad said the district has already gone from having 22 retirees working in city schools to 15, and eight of those are in critically needed positions. He assured the committee that the policy would allow retirees to be hired only for part-time positions, and only when the position in question needed to be filled quickly. He said the policy was carefully constructed and overseen by an attorney to avoid discrimination. The policy says no position will be created or reduced to part-time to accommodate a retiree; all qualified applicants must be considered before a retiree is hired; and any retiree of the Nashua school district must have been away from the district for a minimum of one year.

Hiring retirees who are collecting a public pension and a salary is a practice known as double dipping and has increasingly come under fire as retirement systems are projected to run out of money before their current obligations are met.

State law allows government retirees to return to public-sector work in a part-time capacity, which is currently defined as 32 hours a week or fewer.

Emily Hoyt can be reached at 594-6402 or ehoyt@nashuatelegraph.com.