School Board restores 2 sick days for covid, flu, RSV

The Little Rock School Board voted Thursday to restore up to two days of sick leave to district employees who have been absent from work because of covid-19, the flu and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV).

Board members voted unanimously for the measure at a meeting in which they received reports but took no action on results from firstand second-quarter interim tests given to students, on student participation in new tutoring programs and on a offer from the national Communities In Schools organization to aid the district in expanding its number of schools with special wraparound services.

The restoration of the two days of sick leave is retroactive to the beginning of the current 2022-23 school year for those employees who have documentation from a medical provider and the district’s point of contact team.

LaKeitha Austin, a Cloverdale Middle School teacher and the chairman of the district’s Personnel Policies Committee for state-licensed educators, urged the board to support the proposal, saying that the illnesses have caused some employees to exhaust their traditional number of sick leave days and miss days of pay.

“Two days are better than no days,” Austin said about the plan that was negotiated earlier by teachers and administrator members of the Personnel Policies Committee.

While the district provided extra leave time in past years because of the covid-19 global pandemic, those policies have expired.

District administrators in materials sent to School Board members for Thursday’s meeting said that covid-19 cases “are still active in the state” and “there is a fear that employees may/ will come to work with positive symptoms of covid if they have no personal, sick, or vacation leave; or fear of losing pay.”

The state of Arkansas earlier this month surpassed the 1 million mark in covid-19 case numbers since the highly contagious virus hit in Arkansas in March 2020.