Will McAllen ISD employees get extra leave necessitated by the pandemic and an imminent $2,000 payday? All signs point to yes.
In a board workshop Monday a majority of district trustees indicated they would support five extra days of leave (although they technically won’t be called COVID leave) and accelerating payouts of $1,000 stipends originally meant to be distributed in December 2022 and 2023 as incentive pay.
Monday’s meeting was a workshop and trustees didn’t have the option to vote on either of those topics.
They’ll have the opportunity to vote on them at the board’s Feb. 14 meeting.
A lack of COVID leave — essentially extra paid leave for COVID-19 isolated employees — became a source of tension at McAllen ISD last month, while other districts rolled out that sort of policy amid the omicron surge.
The board heard from some of those discontendend leave-less employees at their workshop Monday, and several trustees made a point of addressing their concerns.
“I want everyone listening to this meeting and I want everyone in this room to know that you are being heard,” Trustee Marco Suarez said. “That just because we don’t react the minute after our discussion doesn’t mean that anyone on this board doesn’t believe wholeheartedly that every teacher is worth not only their pay, but their gratitude.”
The problem with COVID pay, Suarez said, is equity. He voiced concern over restrictions related to the days, saying he didn’t feel that sort of policy would be fair to people who had COVID last year or for the individuals who have long-term symptoms of the coronavirus.
Suarez also hypothesized a teacher who thinks they’ve COVID-19 positive isolating, waiting days for a test result and ending up not being infected.
“I’ve wasted three days, and I cannot cash in my three days,” he said. “So I’m already negative three days instead of thinking that I had two days to reserve.”
Concerns over the equity of COVID leave were briefly touched on in a meeting last month, when Superintendent J.A. Gonzalez said accelerating earmarked retention payouts would be a more equitable solution than COVID leave, a measure the board voted down.
Suarez floated a solution to that equity problem Monday that seemed to resonate with trustees: not restricting those days to COVID-19.
The district says those days would officially be classified as five additional local leave days.
Trustees seemed widely receptive to five extra days of leave that aren’t explicitly restricted to COVID-19 exposure, although they quibbled some over what to do about COVID-related leave in subsequent semesters.
Superintendent Gonzalez also addressed concerns over paying for the extra leave, which were raised by some trustees last month.
“At this point we budgeted for salaries already, so it would just be a matter of allowing them to use these five additional days as they see fit,” he said. “The cost would be the substitute, or the cost would also be … if somebody retired and cashed out their 75 dies, or somebody passed away while they were still with the district.”
In an email, the district said it has a substitute budget to absorb those costs, that salaries are already budgeted to pay employee salaries and to pay employees cashing in their leave when they retire, and that there isn’t currently a need to rollback ESSER projects to pay for extra leave.
The district didn’t provide an estimate of how much those extra days of leave may cost.
STIPEND ACCELERATION
Solving the extra leave question still left the board with the question of stipend accelerations.
The district said in an email last month that extra leave and stipend acceleration aren’t related, and nominally they’re not, despite how much conversations over the two topics have overlapped.
Those issues were more distinctly separated at Monday’s workshop, and it looks like the board will back both extra leave and the accelerated stipend timeline, which would have employees receiving that retention pay this March.
“I want the five days, I want the money and I just want to move forward. As we encounter something new we will deal with that,” Trustee Sofia Peña said.
That seemed to be the general feeling among trustees. There was, however, one vocal board voice opposed to that early payout.
Trustee Debbie Crane-Aliseda consistently opposed the administration’s proposed March payout. The money, she said, was allocated as a retention stipend.
“If we want to give them $2,000 ahead of time, I don’t have a problem with that, I have a problem with the dates,” she said. “Why don’t we wait until we sign teacher contracts for the following year?”
Crane-Aliseda voiced concerns over individuals joining the district and quickly leaving, with their stipend in tow, relatively soon afterward. She suggested a June payout.
Increasingly, district leadership seems to have grown skeptical about whether a couple grand would have any concrete impact on employees’ long term career decisions, and if there are any other strong board critics of a March payout, they didn’t voice their opinion Monday.
That payout date received strong support from Suarez and the superintendent. Gonzalez said the administration was viewing the intent behind the stipend in a different light than its original intention.
“March 11 came from a discussion the administration had,” he said. “And we’re talking about the level of work that our teachers have been doing for the last two years, and everything we’ve asked them to do, the variants that have come through, the amount of stress with regard to closing achievement gaps. So we’re not looking so much through the lens of retention as we are through the lens of appreciation.”
