After several protests at board meetings in May, April and March the district and faculty decided on two tentative agreements for spring negotiations and received positive news about healthcare.

The news was delivered to the Faculty Association representative council on June 4 as an item faculty members will be voting on, and by June 12 the ballots would all be collected and the results would be announced.

Beating that deadline, the Mt. San Antonio College Faculty Association Facebook page posted that the agreements were ratified at a 94 percent approval, with 259 out of 275 ballots in favor on June 11 at 6:46 p.m.

This concluded the long saga of last year’s negotiations but also pushed back negotiations for this year.

Lead faculty negotiator Joan Sholars also announced at the meeting that the district said it would no longer bring up the move away from CalPERS and agreed to let faculty stay in CalPERS with a guaranteed PEMHCA.

An extra 1.29 percent that was being given out has also been applied to health care, meaning a $2,000 increase. While there are still individuals with plans that have to pay out of pocket, this is the biggest increase in health care money that the college has provided in recent memory.

This does not mean that faculty is done with health benefits as there are still things to be negotiated for next year that were not the focus of this year.