Joseph DiPasquale is the NonPartisan Delaware candidate for state representative in the 41st District. He resides in Millsboro.
Recently, my opponent in the 41st District, Republican Rep. Rich Collins, criticized Delaware’s teachers for availing themselves of 12 weeks of paid family leave upon childbirth or the adoption of a young child (“Wisdom of paid family leave questioned,” Aug. 5). In characterizing this as “a financial incentive for teachers to stay home,” he misrepresents statistics, apparently to gin up the “fear (that) paid family leave will further handicap Delaware students that were already disadvantaged after nearly two years of enforced remote learning.”
For example, Rep. Collins treats the 1,184 “school workers” in his discussion of lost instructional time as if these were all teachers. This is false: Delaware’s 9,900 teachers account for less than 52% of public school employees eligible for paid family leave. If all “school workers” and “state employees” take paid family leave at the same rate (an assumption he makes), then only 616 teachers took leave in fiscal year 2021, which is a fraction over 6.5%.
Did those new parents cause a significantly increased loss of instructional time? This is prohibitively unlikely. Why? Because state of Delaware employees can already accrue paid sick leave and avail themselves of unpaid federal Family Medical Leave Act time. In other words, many Delaware teachers already had the potential ability to take those 12 weeks without paid family leave. There is no evidence that the existence of paid family leave for teachers has significantly increased lost instructional hours.
What paid family leave has done is remove the specter of financial hardship causing many women to either continue working too late into their third trimester or return to work too soon after giving birth. Current research suggests that pregnancy generally requires four to 16 weeks off from work, depending on age and the flexibility of the employment situation.
Often, younger teachers who have not worked long enough to accrue substantial sick leave; those susceptible to complications like gestational diabetes or cervical incompetence; or those who give birth to premature or disabled babies risk running completely out of paid sick leave. Their families are placed in the position of deciding between health risks and unsustainable income loss, and thus, many are at risk for never being able to return to their classrooms.
It adds insult to injury to characterize these teachers by innuendo as instructionally “subpar” and looking for excuses to “stay home,” apparently unworried by their infliction of “increased stress on childless employees.”
The legitimate question about paid family leave for state and school district employees is how we pay for it, which has some obvious answers.
Delaware could have generated more than sufficient funding to underwrite paid family leave by legalizing cannabis and taxing its sale, as have numerous other states. To their credit, a large majority in the General Assembly voted for this, but Gov. John Carney and Rep. Collins, in a strange show of negative bipartisanship, united to scuttle it.
The overall tone of Rep. Collins’ article is tinged with unintentional irony. In other forums, he has argued that abortion ought to be banned because America’s women “are just not having enough babies” and that we are “doing away” with fetuses “before they have a chance to grow into these people that we need to support us.”
Nor does he challenge the state’s assertion that “newborns of moms with paid leave were more likely to be breastfed, receive medical checkups and get critical immunizations,” and “increased the likelihood of women returning to the workplace after giving birth.”
As an “average Joe,” I have trouble demanding a commitment to have more babies, while arguing against making it possible for them to receive the best pre- and postnatal care.
I’m also deeply skeptical that, if you really believe most teachers are subpar failures, you think forcing them back into the classroom as early as possible after giving birth is going to improve educational outcomes.
We do have a teacher crisis: Too many of the best are leaving the profession because of terrible working conditions, politicized “accountability” measures and politicians who believe students will get better at math and reading if we require cameras in the classrooms, while making them pass a course on “the evils of communism.”
Paid family leave for teachers is one of the few positive steps that the General Assembly has taken to stop the bleeding, while treating them as if their health and that of their children matter.
We need to keep looking for more sensible, financially responsible initiatives that “average Joes” like me can understand and support.
