The beginning of the spring school semester during a COVID-19 spike led to a flurry of new and renewed extended leave policies for staff at Hidalgo County districts who need to isolate for the coronavirus, policies that leave McAllen ISD employees with one question: Where’s ours?
They don’t have one, and it doesn’t look like there’s any concrete plans to give them one anytime soon.
The question for trustees is how exactly to pay for COVID leave for employees who burn through personal days and sick days because of the coronavirus.
“From the information that I have gathered, it is a significant concern that it would dip into either fund balance, or in this case they’re talking ESSER funds — which as I mentioned, you would have to take something off the table in order to do it,” school board President Sam Saldivar said Tuesday.
Trustee Debbie Crane-Aliseda, citing decreasing enrollment and budgetary restrictions, put it in more blunt terms: The district has to figure out how to pay COVID leave “without bankrupting the school district.”
Both of those trustees support COVID leave in theory, or at least having a conversation about it.
Other districts in the county have managed to extend extra COVID leave, citing concerns over employees who have no more sick leave but must be absent because of exposure or infection to the coronavirus.
There’s also a clear desire for some sort of COVID leave policy among McAllen teachers.
An online AFT petition demanding pandemic protocol changes, among COVID leave, had over 500 signatures as of Saturday, but the group says those signatures haven’t elicited action from the district.
“The thing is, the district keeps telling us there is no money to pay COVID days,” AFT President Sylvia Tanguma said.
The district’s board still hasn’t officially discussed the financial burden tied to COVID-19 leave this year, but they did obliquely address that sort of leave Monday in a discussion about accelerating $2,000 of previously earmarked stipend payouts, an acceleration meant to help teachers dealing with pandemic hardships.
The board ultimately voted down that proposal, though it seems likely it will come up again.
An assistant superintendent at that meeting said those stipends were “in lieu of” COVID leave before saying he’d misspoken later in the meeting.
Superintendent J.A. Gonzalez described the accelerated payouts as more equitable than COVID leave and didn’t say he’d misspoken. The district’s official line is that those issues are unrelated, although some trustees weren’t as sure about that, and leadership at the local teachers union seems to think the opposite.
The board voting down that stipend leaves leadership in the district fractured over the question of how to reward employees equitably for their pandemic hardships when there may not be enough money budgeted to enact a quick COVID leave policy.
For Clarissa Riojas, a teacher and a vice-president of the local AFT Union, the answer is clear: teachers deserve COVID leave and their stipend money.
“When you have mothers of young children who have either tested positive or were exposed, they’re having to take time off to take care of their families,” she said Tuesday. “Once they also become sick, then they’re also having to take time off.”
Situations like that, Riojas says, have led to situations where her coworkers only have a day or two of time off left. Others, she says, are seeing their paychecks docked because they have no time left.
Riojas said she doesn’t think that assistant superintendent misspoke in the meeting last week; she says the district was viewing an accelerated stipend payment as a solution to its lack of COVID leave.
That, Riojas says, is unfair to teachers and akin to being cheated.
“Because that money was already allocated,” she said. “District employees were already due that money. And my position on it — and I know that my colleagues will agree — is that teachers need both. Teachers need the stipend and they need COVID pay.”
Board president Saldivar said that a state allowance addressed COVID leave last year, though it doesn’t look like that will happen again.
The district received tens of millions of dollars in ESSER funding meant to address the pandemic; it very publicly contributed $4 million of those monies to an improvement project at Quinta Mazatlan and another $2 million for an IMAS expansion.
Saldivar said that sort of long-term facility planning was meant to catapult students forward after the pandemic ended.
“That was the hope and the belief as we were preparing to start this school year during the summer discussions, the board with the superintendent, and I think the community at large,” Saldivar said. “And then delta hit. And then the omicron hit.”
Saldivar said he wasn’t sure how much money it would take to pay for a COVID leave policy. He said it would likely be significant, and that funds earmarked for ESSER projects would be the likely place to scrounge.
Saldivar said he thinks the COVID pay discussion needs to happen, though he’s not sure the district will actually be able to afford a policy like that this year. He also hopes board focus shifts from long-term goals to short-term needs, which he says are pressing.
“We may have to recalibrate and take a few things off the table that we had planned from a facilities aspect, to now look at what our staff and our employees and our students and their families need,” he said.
Both Saldivar and Crane-Aliseda voted against that stipend acceleration Monday. They said it felt rushed, and that the relationship between that acceleration and COVID leave was unclear.
Crane-Aliseda met the district’s assertion that there was no relation with a chuckle
“It didn’t seem like anybody really understood,” Crane-Aliseda said.
Board proponents for accelerating stipend pay described the urgency of the situation: employees need support now.
Saldivar and Crane-Aliseda both said they recognize the urgency of that need, but they don’t think COVID leave and stipend acceleration are the same discussion.
Crane-Aliseda echoed AFT members who said solving the COVID leave problem with stipend payments would be unacceptable. She also opposed accelerating the stipends, saying there was a reason the last payment wasn’t scheduled until 2023.
“Because that’s the whole purpose, is to retain our employees through this whole time,” Crane-Aliseda said, ending a carrot and stick analogy that was not well received by some teachers and she later apologized for.
With no clear direction on the leave question apparent, Riojas says she and her colleagues are likely to keep fuming. They are, she said, frustrated that a district could afford to spend millions of dollars on a park expansion and a museum expansion but can’t find money to pay coronavirus-isolated teachers.
Those long-term facilities projects are great, Riojas said, but there are more pressing needs now — needs that need a solution.
“People are hurting now,” she said. “People are being docked now. And for a lot of reasons that are beyond their control.”
