Retired public teachers, including superintendents, who are reemployed with local boards of education are not permitted to receive additional fringe benefits that push their compensation packages in excess of 45 percent of the maximum salary for the position in question, according to an opinion issued earlier this week by state Attorney General George Jepsen.

The opinion, issued on June 17, was response to a request from Teachers’ Retirement Board Administrator Darlene Perez for the attorney general’s opinion on the state statute governing such compensation packages.

Melodie Peters, president of the American Federation of Teachers Connecticut union, has said Perez’s request was inspired in part by the employment contract of Waterford Superintendent Jerome Belair.

A salary of $220,000 was slated for Belair for the 2014-15 school year. In September, he announced he was retiring, but would not end his tenure with the district until June 2015.

The contract enacted at the time of his announced retirement split the $220,000 in compensation between a salary of $99,000 and retirement benefits of $121,000.

The deal allowed Belair to separately begin collecting $140,000 in pension benefits from the state. The $140,000 came from state funds and not the district budget.

When the board voted to extend the contract through the 2015-16 school year, AFT Connecticut voiced opposition to the extension. Belair announced amid the ensuing controversy that he would end his tenure in June 2015 — this month — as originally planned.

“While Waterford’s costly contract was the catalyst (for the opinion), it’s not the only case of a school board offering a former administrator an arrangement in conflict with state statute,” Peters said in a written statement.

She said the union was thankful that the Attorney General had provided “clear guidance for the Teachers‘ Retirement Board going forward.”

“The TRB will apply the interpretation going forward,” Perez wrote in an email.

Belair said the district has asked its legal counsel to review the opinion and advise the district, which he said the attorneys are in the process of doing.

“We really need to wait to get an interpretation of what this opinion really means,” Belair said.

Board of Education member and state Rep. Kathleen McCarty, R-Waterford, said she still believed the law was unclear in its wording.

McCarty, who served as board chairwoman when the board initiated the contract with Belair following his September announcement he was retiring, emphasized that attorneys from the board’s law firm Shipman & Goodwin had advised that the contract was in line with state statute.

“I wouldn’t want the community to think the board was trying to do anything that it shouldn’t,” she said.

She said she plans to push for clarification in the wording of the statute in the 2016 legislative session and that the attorney general's opinion would be a helpful guide for legislators.

She mentioned that she knew of other districts in the state that had entered into similar contracts as the one Waterford did with Belair, evidence that the statute was unclear to other districts, as well.

In the opinion, the attorney general argues that while the law in question, Connecticut General Statute 10-193, does not explicitly address non-salary compensation, that silence does not constitute ambiguity of intention. McCarty said she disagreed that the law was not ambiguous.

The opinion goes on to say that the statute establishes a general rule against the retirees the law covers from receiving retirement benefits while receiving compensation for teaching positions including superintendent positions.

The 45 percent provision is the one exception to that general rule, and allowing compensation beyond 45 percent of the maximum salary for the position in question “would result in no limitation at all,” the opinion states.

Moreover, the opinion cites case law in asserting that specific language by default prevails over more general language. Thus, the use of the term salary should not be taken to indicate other compensation beyond the stated cap is permitted, according to the opinion.

“The use of the more specific term ‘salary’ in the exception is strong evidence that the legislature did not intend to permit a local board of education to compensate a reemployed teacher beyond 45% of the maximum salary level for the assigned position” by providing fringe benefits, the opinion states.

Health insurance is the only benefit permitted and only under certain provisions of the statute, according to the opinion.

Waterford Federation of Classroom Teachers President Martha Shoemaker said application of the attorney general’s reading of the law should mean savings for towns where contracts similar to Belair’s have been enforced.

She said she hopes the opinion will put pressure on the Waterford board to be more transparent.

t.townsend@theday.com

Twitter: @ConnecticuTess