NC public school teachers have to pay $50 to take vacation day when classes are in session. Is this common in other states?
it looks like they get some type of paid leave that’s not supposed to be used while classes are in session. If they want to use it while classes are in session then 50$ is deducted from their pay.
My work does something similar, around certain holidays you can’t take any vacation days unless they’re approved far in advance, so if you decide to just not show up that day even claiming a sick day you forfeit some of your holiday pay that’s paid to people who work all those days.
My wife has 3 personal days per year. If she uses another one she doesn’t get paid for that day. She has quite a number of sick days that she can use but she doesn’t use them unless it’s for something medical.
Oklahoma teacher here. Without looking at any HR/union paperwork…
I get 10 sick days per year (they accumulate over time if unused). Ordinarily, they don’t check if these are cause you or a family member is actually sick/at a doctor, though they reserve the right to. I pay nothing if these are used, though after accruing a certain number (180? IDK), they get cashed out at approx a sub’s daily pay on my last check of the school year.
I get 1 free personal day per year and 3 days that I have to cover $50 or so of the sub cost. These can be used for whatever. If unused, they roll into your sick day stash.
I’m in no danger of running out of either, but I think if you run out they charge you the whole sub cost ($100?). There are provisions to donate days to someone who needs them (often new mothers).
If you use personal days right before a vacation, they charge you double. And they do examine sick days taken then in more detail. This became a bit of an issue with our school year being extended due to the teacher walkout. TEachers already made Memorial Day plans that were now on school days instead of summer break. I think the district is being as flexible as possible here.
There are also bereavement days. They’re uncapped, but you better actually have a dead loved one.
I’d be very surprised if subs were making that much in Oklahoma. Around here, even the rich suburbs only pay around $90, and I understand that Oklahoma is a lot less teacher-friendly in general.
Though I suppose they might be adding some for the administrative overhead costs of calling up a sub.
My wife is a teacher in California, and although she doesn’t have to pay to take a vacation day, she does have to arrange for a sub on her own. And she does have to spend extra time beforehand making plans for the sub to follow. So she doesn’t like to take time off during the school year unless she has to.
In Georgia, public school teachers get 12 sick leave days, 3 personal leave days, and whatever professional leave days are assigned by the administration. The personal leave days are simply sick leave days one doesn’t have to be sick to use. Whether one can use those along with a weekend usually depends on the principal, but IIRC, they can’t be used to lengthen a regularly scheduled school vacation. The vast majority of public schools in Georgia are county-run. One county I worked for required jury paychecks to be signed over to the county office, while the other didn’t. One good thing about teaching in Georgia is that every unused sick leave day counts for one day earlier retirement.
I can’t imagine what a logistical nightmare that must be, both for the teachers and for the subs. How does a teacher connect with a sub? How does every teacher connect with every sub? Or are all subs personal friends with individual teachers, and have so much leisure time that they can afford to be available for a job that’ll only come up a few times a semester?
After having been a teacher for over a decade my wife has the contact information for many subs in her phone book. It’s actually a fairly complicated procedure: First she’ll call the subs she knows in order of how good she thinks they are, until she finds one that is available the day she needs one. Then she has to call the school district office to let them know which sub will will be coming that day.
If no sub my wife knows is available, the school district will pick another one for her from their list, but according to my wife they are usually terrible, so it’s better if she picks the sub.
In the teachers’ lounge there are the business cards for many subs; they try to get business by having teachers request them specifically.
She cannot take a day off without arranging for a substitute, which makes last minute things that come up a challenge.
Huh?! How on earth could they require such a thing?!
Since they pay you while you are on jury duty, it’s in the employee rules.
I suppose you can refuse and they can fire you instead.
My mother was a teacher. She was salaried. The school is almost certainly going to have to let a teacher serve on a jury, without being entitled to prorate the teacher’s salary for the interval, so the teacher is still effectively getting their full pay while serving on the jury. Jury pay is basically nothing (like $50/day when called in), so it is not an unreasonable demand.
I was told a way around it was to take your three personal leave days to do the jury duty. Then you could keep the jury duty checks for those three days. Fortunately, I never had a jury duty in that county. I did do a week on a murder trial in the county that let me keep the checks, though it really made more work for me.
I don’t see why they couldn’t. I am a public employee (although not a teacher) and I don’t even get a check when I’m on jury duty since I get my regular pay without using any leave time. I suppose I could lie at the point where the court questionaire asks if I am a public employee, but that would be committing a crime.
My high school of about 1,200 students had at least one full-time substitute teacher on staff. The nice thing about that sort of arrangement is that he got to know a lot of the students, and vice versa. So there weren’t the attendance shenanigans and other disciplinary problems you tend to have with substitutes. He’d do hall or lunch room monitoring duty too, but I don’t know if that was him filling in because he wasn’t needed as a sub that day, or if he was covering the duties of the teacher he was subbing for (several teachers did at least one period of hall monitoring or study hall since they could just sit at a desk at one of the various checkpoints or building entrances and grade papers while I assume earning some extra money).
Around here, there’s a computer system that handles it. If a teacher needs to take a day off, then they just log in and click a few buttons. The subs can also log in at any time, and see a list of jobs that are available, and click one to accept it. Teachers can create a list of preferred subs, and if a teacher has any preferred subs, those subs will see the listings 10% earlier than anyone else (thus, for instance, if the day off is put in 10 hours before the time the job starts, the non-preferred subs would have to wait an hour before they could take the job, if none of the preferred subs beat them to it). Of course, if you know about a day off far enough in advance, then you can make arrangements with a specific sub, but it’s never necessary to do so. Most of the districts around here collaborate on a single sub pool: I work in four different districts, and I could work in a dozen more if the travel time weren’t prohibitive.
The difficulty with that is that there tends to be a correlation between when teachers are out, especially within a single school. Sometimes there’s a professional-development workshop that all of the math teachers, say, are attending. And sometimes there’s “something going around” in the school, so a lot of teachers are sick. On the other hand, right after a vacation, there are much fewer subs. So it’s hard to plan for how many full-time subs are appropriate. And I find that I work at the same schools often enough anyway that I still get to know many of the students (at least, the ones who really need to be known). I’m quite happy that I’ve managed to get through this entire year without having to deal with one particular problem student.
$90 a day? That doesn’t seem like very much. $90 an hour? That seems like way too much.
Yes, $90 a day. Teaching is the proverbial “not doing it for the money” profession, and subs get paid even less than full-timers.
In an urban district in the late '80s, my mother was at the bottom-right of the salary schedule (MA+60, 20+ years of service) and making more than, as I recall, $60K a year, which was pretty decent at the time. And although that was only for a nine month year, it did cost her quite a bit of time and money to get to the MA+60 column, she spent some of her own money on classroom adornments/supplies, and teachers spend quite a bit more time on their job than just the work day (she once calculated her wage and concluded that the school janitor was making more than she was by the hour and not taking any work home with him). She specialized in EMR (special needs education) up until she held a stack of IEPs on the scale and determined that her paperwork weighed more than she did.