Whether Karns City School District teachers opt to strike in response to the current contract stalemate is a question that will be answered over the next several weeks, or perhaps when fall classes begin, if no settlement is reached by then.

The teachers have given their union leadership the authority to call a strike if negotiations for a new pact continue to be unproductive. That is their right under the commonwealth's public employees bargaining law.

The teachers have been working under the terms of their latest contract since it expired on July 1, 2009. In February, there were hopes that a settlement was imminent when the school board approved a fact-finding report, but the teachers twice rejected the report because it lacked early retirement incentives.

In addition to wages and an early retirement provision, the impasse has centered on health care contributions, the length of the contract (the district wants a three-year contract; the union wants a five-year pact), and an agreement in which married teachers could receive extra cash instead of having a second health care policy.

Throughout business and industry, employees and employers are wrestling with the high — and getting higher — costs of health care coverage. At a time when the nation is consumed by the issue of health care reform and with trying to take a realistic approach to the complex issue, the Karns City teachers' health care contract proposal is far from realistic and far from the taxpayers' best interests — although similar situations exist in other Butler County school districts.

Here's what Karns City taxpayers pay each year for teachers' health care benefits: For an individual teacher, the premium is $5,165; for family coverage, $13,637; for an employee and spouse, $11,829; for an employee and his or her children, with no spouse coverage, $10,589.

Under the district's contract proposal, teachers' health care contributions would be 7.25 percent of the monthly health care premium — significantly more than the paltry sum of $10 per month that they currently pay, but significantly less than what they should be paying.

In response, the teachers have expressed a willingness to contribute $10 to $15 per month toward their coverage — an insult to taxpayers, many of whom are paying much more each month for much less generous health care benefits than what the teachers receive.

Throughout business and industry, more and more companies are requiring that their workers shoulder a bigger share of their health care coverage costs. For the most part, teachers throughout Pennsylvania, during their contract negotiations, for as long as most people can remember, have projected themselves as being above assuming a fair share of those costs.

At the same time, throughout Butler County for much of the past 40 years, teachers have gotten annual pay increases that have dwarfed what many, if not most, private-sector workers have gotten. Significant givebacks have been virtually unheard-of in any teachers contract.

Now, despite health care costs imposing ever-more-serious challenges to school district budgets, including Karns City's, teachers' bargaining units have remained unreasonably steadfast and ungiving.

Perhaps most Karns City taxpayers haven't paid attention to the price of a teachers contract. Perhaps their only concern is that a strike be avoided.

Whatever Karns City residents' majority opinion might be, the strike-authorization vote should be regarded as a springboard for the voicing of individual viewpoints.

Like the possibility of a strike, public opinion will have the opportunity to play out between now and when a new pact finally has both sides' approval. But will it?