Paid sick days directly affect school children by Marlene Pollock

July 14, 2011 - 12:00 AM

As an elected School Committee member in New Bedford, I want to lend my support to the passage of the Act Establishing Paid Sick Days in Massachusetts. Currently, nearly 1 million Massachusetts residents do not have a single paid sick day. Eighty percent of these people are service industry workers, traditionally employed in lower paid jobs.

This impacts our school children directly. Many families, unable to take any time off for any reason and not lose a day's pay, are forced to send their sick children to school. As a result, many of these children end up in the nurse's office for most of the day, missing critical instruction time. They run the risk of being sicker longer because they either cannot have the proper rest and care to get better faster or are unable to see their doctor when their offices are open during the day. These families are forced to forgo preventive care and pay for emergency room visits, spending three times more for these visits than the cost for seeing their own doctor.

With sick children in school, more germs are spread to both students and staff. New Bedford Public Schools pays over a million dollars to hire substitutes to stand in for teachers who become ill from being exposed to sick children. This money could be much better spent on the many needs we have for instruction. We need to give families the means to care for their sick children, at the same time ensuring that our public school environment is healthier for all.

This bill would allow employees in Massachusetts to earn up to seven paid sick days per year based on how many hours they work. This is a very modest bill that simply allows employees paid time off to care for their families. Many major cities in the country have enacted this law, and Connecticut recently passed the first statewide paid sick leave law.

Those interested in working for passage of this bill can contact the Coalition Against Poverty/Coalition for Social Justice at 508-999-2777.


Marlene Pollock is a member of the New Bedford School Committee.