HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – For gay and lesbian faculty at Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities, the wait for health care benefits that cover their partners is almost over.

Domestic partner health insurance was added outright to the menu of fringe benefits in a tentative contract agreement the faculty union reached last week with the State System of Higher Education.

If the union and the system’s board ratify the pact in the coming weeks, the professors will become the first unionized state employees to receive domestic partner health benefits.

Rita Drapkin, a tenured professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, said that means her partner of 30 years will no longer have to pay for more expensive private health insurance that covers only catastrophic illness.

“We’ve waited a long time for it, but it’s about more than the money,” said Drapkin, a psychologist at IUP’s counseling center. “It’s about not being second-class citizens.”

The old contract that covered the 5,500 members of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties included the prospect of same-sex health care benefits, but said the system would provide them only if the state extended similar benefits to other unionized state workers.

That didn’t happen.

It is up to the board of the Pennsylvania Employees Benefit Trust Fund, which oversees state workers’ health care benefits, to decide whether to provide domestic partner health insurance to unions representing tens of thousands of employees.

Two years ago, the fund’s board, prompted partly by persistent lobbying by the state system faculty union, voted to study the possibility of offering health coverage to same-sex couples and unmarried heterosexual couples who live together. The board set no deadline for completing the study, however, and it has been occupied since then with other concerns relating to the fund’s revenue, said David Fillman, the board’s chair.

“It got put on hold,” said Fillman, who is also executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

The notion of providing benefits to same-sex partners of public employees has rankled conservative Republican state lawmakers, who tried unsuccessfully in recent years to advance legislation that would ban them.

Last week, an activist with an organization that opposes same-sex relationships criticized the domestic partner health insurance provision of the state system’s tentative agreement.

“The promotion of domestic partner benefits is not about good business, but about bowing under the pressure exerted from those trying to equate same-sex partnerships to marriage,” Diane Gramley, of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “They are not the same and any business that works to undermine marriage will ultimately suffer the financial consequences.”

For now, the benefits trust fund is adhering to a state law that bans same-sex marriage in determining who is eligible for benefits, said Kate Farley, the fund’s executive director.

University administrators had “fully expected” that by the end of the faculty union’s old contract they would be providing domestic partner benefits to professors in same-sex relationships who met certain other criteria, system spokesperson Kenn Marshall said.

Marshall acknowledged that the issue remained a loose end in the most recent negotiations.

“This time it was still on the table, and there was still a position that (the union) wanted these benefits,” Marshall said. “We thought it was appropriate.”

The system estimates that only 1 percent of the union will take advantage of the benefits, costing the universities about $380,000 in a contract valued at $437 million, Marshall said.

A number of other public and private universities in Pennsylvania already offer domestic partner benefits, including Penn State University, where about two dozen of 40,000 employees have signed up for them.

The lack of such benefits in the state system has hurt its efforts to fill faculty vacancies, turning off not only applicants in same-sex relationships but also those who simply believe that not offering them is discriminatory, union president Pat Heilman said.

“It’s a larger competitive problem than people think,” Heilman said.