Did anyone see the cover of the AJC today? The title was "Teacher Absences Cost You Millions". It was about the cost of paying for substitutes, since clearly teachers don't deserve paid leave from our jobs.
Since it was some sort of special research article, I can't post the entire thing. But here is some info about it from the AJC blog.
AJC Blog
Anyone care to comment?
We are public employees. Our paychecks come from the taxpayers. I think we all understand that. However, does that mean we don't deserve the same respect as other professionals? I would be shocked to hear about ANY government employees who have unpaid sick leave.
ReplyDeleteTeachers are people, too. We have children who wake up at one in the morning throwing up like crazy, and we have to take a day off to take them to the doctor. We also have cars that break down and relatives who get married in October, and we have to decide how to divide our three personal days for the year. I don't see any teachers at my job calling in sick for a week to go on a cruise or anything of that nature. I do, however, see co-workers who fight to overcome simple infections because they HATE to miss school and force themselves to come back to work before they are fully better!
I also wonder how maternity leave numbers skew this data. We are a workforce of mostly women. There is at least one pregnant teacher on the staff of my school at all times. And yes, we deserve paid maternity leave!