Teacher parental leave pay gets veto

Gov. Brown on Sunday vetoed a bill that would have provided almost all teachers and other employees in California public schools and community colleges with six weeks of fully paid maternity leave starting next year.

Most California school employees do not participate in the California State Disability Insurance program, which is funded by employees through payroll deductions. It provides partial pay when an employee can’t work because of a non-

work-related illness, injury, pregnancy or childbirth. School districts could participate in this program, but most don’t.

School-district employees who want to get paid during maternity leave must first exhaust all of their accumulated paid sick leave. After that, they can get “differential pay,” which is the difference between their salary and what a district pays or in some cases would pay a substitute, for what remains of their pregnancy disability and baby bonding leave. As a result, many teachers come back to work with a new baby and no paid sick leave to take if they or their baby gets sick.

AB568 would have given school employees six weeks of fully paid leave before they had to take any accumulated sick leave. But it provided no funding for the new benefit; each school district would have had to pay it out of its own resources.

In a veto message, Brown said he signed two previous bills that provide differential pay for maternity and paternity leave.

“I believe further decisions regarding leave policies for school employees are best resolved through the collective bargaining process at the local level. I would also encourage districts to consider participating in the State Disability Insurance program that would allow these employees to receive pay in addition to what is already being provided.”

Proponents said the bill was designed to help schools attract and retain staff at a time when many are facing teacher shortages.

“The state will need to better demonstrate that it will accommodate teachers who want to be mothers and vice versa without forcing them to use all their sick leave. It’s an issue of basic fairness that these young women should expect if they are going to commit to the teaching profession,” the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, D-San Diego, said in an email.