NC eases rules on how teachers can take a personal day without being charged for it
North Carolina public school teachers can now give any reason for taking a personal day without being charged the cost of hiring a substitute teacher to cover their classes.
State lawmakers passed a budget in November that said teachers could stop being charged the substitute teacher fee as long as they give a reason for the personal day. The State Board of Education passed a policy amendment on Thursday that will prevent school districts from determining any reason given to be unacceptable.
“Any reason provided by the teacher will prevent the substitute deduction from being applied,” Tom Tomberlin, director of Educator Recruitment and Support at the state Department of Public Instruction, told the state board on Wednesday.
Tomberlin said most school districts didn’t want to be in the business of deciding what’s acceptable.
Teachers charged for using personal days
Teachers receive up to two personal leave days each year. Requests for the days off have to be approved if they’re made at least five days in advance. But even teachers with automatically approved requests still need to give some reason to not be charged.
In the past, teachers have used personal days for things such as participating in the mass teacher protests held in downtown Raleigh.
Before the budget was passed, North Carolina charged teachers $50 if a substitute was needed on a personal day. This resulted in some teachers using sick days, even when they weren’t ill, to avoid being charged, according to Rep. Jeffrey Elmore, a Wilkes County Republican and public school teacher.
Elmore had proposed legislation saying teachers who give a reason for a personal day shouldn’t be charged for hiring a sub. But failure to give a reason under the legislation would mean that teachers are now charged “the full cost of hiring the substitute,” doubling the $50 payroll deduction to more than $100.
Elmore’s bill was included as part of the state budget. But the budget did not define what reasons were acceptable.
What’s an acceptable reason?
Tomberlin told the state board that it’s their job to apply the new state law to the employee benefits policy manual.
Under a draft policy that was scheduled to be voted on in January, the board would have left it up to each district to develop a local policy on acceptable reasons. Tomberlin told the board this provision was added under the presumption that lawmakers expected teachers to give good reasons for using a personal day.
But state board member James Ford questioned districts wading into determining whether a reason is acceptable.
“Candidly, my concern is that in a pandemic, when you’re dealing with massive teacher shortages, reasons abound,” Ford, a former North Carolina Teacher of the Year, said at the January board meeting. “The collective trauma everybody is going through, the health concerns, etc.
“The concern I have is that leaving that approval or disapproval in the hands of districts or whoever to say ‘yay’ or ‘no,’ I think really just further compounds the problem.”
Based on the board concerns, the policy change was removed from the January meeting agenda. Tomberlin said he subsequently discussed the issue with all of the state’s school human resources directors and the Teacher Recruitment and Incentive Task Force.
“The overwhelming feedback was that LEAs (local education agencies) do not want to identify specific reasons and so we have stricken that section from the policy,” Tomberlin said.
This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 2:24 PM with the headline "NC eases rules on how teachers can take a personal day without being charged for it."
