Firing a Teacher for Using Sick Leave to Attend a Concert Is a Huge Overreaction

All right, tell me if you think this is a huge overreaction.

A teacher in Ohio could be fired for using sick leave to attend a concert.

She called in sick for two days and had actually gone to a concert in Nashville.

And the school board is mad.

The district is mad.

And I understand Ohio in particular has some very strict laws about using sick leave.

But it seems to me that firing somebody over using sick leave for a non-sick purpose is just a huge overreaction.

And here's why.

Almost everybody has done this, right?

Let's be honest.

Almost everybody in this profession has used sick leave for a situation other than being personally sick.

Maybe it was to attend a wedding.

Maybe it was to help out with somebody who wasn't like a family member and didn't like strictly meet the definitions of illness, you know, maybe you had to help a friend move.

I think there are lots and lots of reasons that people use their sick leave.

And to some extent, we see it as an entitlement.

We see it as a benefit of employment.

You get a certain number of sick days and you're allowed to use those days for whatever you want.

The thing is, that's not quite true, right?

Sick leave is not for whatever you want.

It is for specifically being sick.

And often there are personal days that are for whatever you want.

There might be an unrestricted category, but usually sick leave is a restricted category.

And I think we have to understand why sick leave exists and what would happen if sick leave became an unrestricted category, which is happening in some places.

The places that it is happening, it sure seems to me like people are getting a lot less unrestricted leave than they would have gotten as sick leave and i think in seattle when i was a teacher in principle like teachers got like 19 days a year for sick leave with the understanding that most people would not use them right it's very rare that you as an individual person are going to be sick 19 days in one school year but if you have a chronic illness if you have a major disease if you have family like if covid whips through your family like yeah you might use 19 sick days in a year But that does not mean that every staff member should miss 19 days of the school year if it can be avoided.

So the idea here is that those days are available if you really need them.

But we don't want people to be taking off 10% of the school year.

That is just too much in the way of absence.

It's too much for students.

We know that if our students are absent 10% of the time, we call that chronically absent.

And I think we've got to be...

present at school to do our jobs.

Frankly, I hated being behind when I was gone.

But we're all going to have these kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, right?

To attend a friend's wedding, to attend maybe a funeral that doesn't technically count as bereavement because they weren't technically related to you.

There are all these kind of edge cases.

where I think we just need to be reasonable about things like this.

And maybe a concert with your friends is not really an edge case, but have some common sense.

Don't post on social media, have some discretion, and don't do this kind of thing a lot.

I think, honestly, everybody's obligated to follow the law.

I'm not going to advise anybody to violate their contract, but at the same time, let's chill out about some of this stuff because, frankly, everybody has done it.

Let me know what you think.