Do Teachers Need More PTO?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder shares his potentially unpopular view that teachers already receive significant time off and that the focus should be on making the work sustainable rather than adding more days away.
Key Takeaways
- Teachers already get substantial time off - Between summers, holidays, and breaks, educators receive significantly more time off than most professions
- The real problem is workload, not time off - Adding PTO doesn't fix an unsustainable job; simplifying the role does
- Time during the school year matters more - Reducing daily demands and unnecessary meetings would help more than additional days off
Transcript
Should educators get PTO days that are distinct from sick leave?
I saw this post from board teachers about how it would be nice to have just PTO that you could use any way you want, like other professionals get to.
And I think what we have to keep in mind as educators is that we get a lot more time off than people in other fields do.
I mean, there are jobs where you have to work seven days a week.
Any day of the week could be a time that you have a shift.
Your shift could be 20 hours long if you're in the you know, emergency response field.
There are jobs that are much harder in terms of hours and days off than education.
And that doesn't mean that this is an easy job, but it does mean that we need to be careful about what we advocate for and not waste our effort asking for the wrong things.
Think about how much PTO you get in a school year.
Well, there are 180 days in a school year that you have to, you know, be there for and you get sick leave.
And I think people should have sick leave to be able to stay home when they're sick, to be able to go to the doctor, or take care of a loved one who is sick, I think that's a legitimate thing.
But PTO, I honestly don't get.
I mean, we have a huge number of weeks, 14 weeks at least when there's no school at all, plus you have holidays.
So like, I get that you gotta go to the doctor, but why do we need separate PTO?
And I think the argument that we make against chronic absenteeism for students applies to us as well, right?
Like if we want our year to be coherent, if we don't want there to be big gaps we've got to be there too.
And I personally, you know, when I left Seattle Public Schools, I had like years of sick leave saved up that I had just barely touched at all.
And I don't think we should try to use up that leave if it means that we miss some of those few precious days that school is in session.
School is in session less than half of the days of the year, 180 out of 365.
And I just think those days matter.
I think that, you know, gives us enough time to take care of other business, to go on vacation, to go to concerts, to go to you know like maybe occasionally there's a wedding or something where like the date you can't control and i think two days of pto is fine for that that's what i got i got two personal days and you know if that's ever not enough people could take unpaid leave if that's really a big deal for them but i think we need to incentivize people to show up to school students and staff and i think maybe this is an unpopular position to take but let me know what you think