Last week, Faculty Senate postponed consideration of the University of Idaho leave policy for all employees due to proposed revisions.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Faculty Senate continued the discussion about changes to the policy and voted on the proposed revisions. The floor was open for senators to express their opinions and ask questions regarding the changes.
The first concept discussed involved proposed parenting leave revisions.
“These revisions are intended to provide employees with a choice about whether to use up their paid leave for parenting leave or whether to take some unpaid leave for parenting leave, preserving an amount of their paid leave for future needs,” said Faculty Senate Chair Liz Brandt.
Following some discussion, Faculty Senate voted on the first group of changes. This included the amended definition of parenting, clarification on employee eligibility for parenting leave six months after hire, substituted language and other related minor changes to bring everything into compliance, Brandt said.
Faculty Senate voted unanimously in favor of the adopted changes to the parenting leave sections to the policy.
The second revision topics discussed were in regard to the shared leave policy.
“It is clarifying in particular that when individual employees donate shared leave to a particular individual, if that donation is not used by the intended recipient and additional leave is returned to the leave bank,” Brandt said.
In the previous meeting, Faculty Senate proposed the addition of language to the shared leave provision. Brandt said the additional language will help point a direction to employees who want to donate leave but are concerned about losing their own leave if the intended recipient doesn’t use it.
“It points them to talk to HR and to make an incremental donation of leave for that purpose,” Brandt said.
Faculty Senate voted unanimously to add the sentence to the end of the existing paragraph involving shared leave in the policy.
The next set of revisions focused on the general family medical leave portion of the policy.
“This really is a change that was also trying to provide for the same choice for employees in the case of a (Family and Medical Leave Act) type leave as they would have in the case of a parenting leave,” Brandt said. “That is to either choose to use up all of their paid leave for their family medical leave or to be able to preserve some paid leave for a future need.”
Faculty Senate voted unanimously to add the new language to the proposed policy.
Several minor changes, including titles and grammatical errors, were also discussed among Faculty Senate.
Grouping together the additional revisions, Faculty Senate voted unanimously to pass the remaining changes.
Savannah Cardon can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @savannahlcardon