Jack Lyons recalls how fortunate he and his wife felt throughout a complicated pregnancy when their bosses at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville proved to be empathetic.
Raina Lyons was ordered on several months of bed rest before their daughter was born in October 2012. Afterward, the Lyons lived in Little Rock for two months while the baby was hospitalized in a neonatal intensive-care unit.
“There was no chance we were going to be able to teach the fall semester,” said Jack, a professor of philosophy. At the time, Raina, also a university employee, was transitioning to a teaching post in the English department.
Jack needed an assignment that would allow him to work from home so as to care for his wife, and Raina couldn’t work at all for several months.
“It would have been very hard for me to teach even if I had been in town,” Jack Lyons said. But he could do research and service workeven while the couple lived in Little Rock.
About that time, the university was crafting a new policy, called a “Modified Work Assignment for Maternity and Paternity,” which wasn’t timed quite right to help the Lyons. It became effective Aug. 16, 2012.
But Jack credits their supervisors, Thomas Senor, the philosophy department’s chairman, and Dorothy Stephens, the English department’s chairman, with crafting solutions that helped them it through their crisis.
“I’m glad that what mine and Raina’s department chairs were able to do for us is now something the university is behind,” Jack Lyons said.
The maternity-paternity parental leave policy is one of two new benefits the university began offering between fall 2012 and this fall that allow women to cobble together a maternity-leave plan that causes less disruption to their financial and professional lives, officials said.
One is an insurance-plan benefit; the other, a procedure for requesting an altered work assignment, said Leah Williams, UA’s compensation programs administrator. Each is separate from the federal Family Medical Leave Act and in some cases can supplement the act.
The act provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for certain life events, including childbirth and newborn care, the adoption or foster-care placement of a child, and caring for a family member with a serious health condition.
The maternity-paternity modified work assignment is a benefit that UA faculty and nonclassified staff can apply for through a chain of supervisors. The employee can request a modified work assignment - which could include working from home - for up to six weeks, “or up to 15 weeks under special circumstances,” after the employee exhausts available sick leave and submits a Family Medical Leave Act application.
The second benefit - a short-term disability insurance policy that can cover a range of things, including maternity benefits for a mother - came about because Arkansas rules prohibited the modified-work benefit for classified staff, whose pay scales and compensation are controlled by state government, said Trish Watkins, chair of UA-Fayetteville’s staff senate. With the exception of maternity leave, employees must exhaust allaccrued sick leave and vacation time before using it.
In summer 2012, UA administrators asked the staff senate for its blessing for what was then a proposed benefitfor campus employees allowing maternity-paternity modified work assignments for childbirth or adoptions. Senators voted to support it during a July retreat,.
The senators worked with the campus Human Resources office and the University of Arkansas System to implement the second benefit.
A little more than a year after the faculty and nonclassified staff got their modified work-assignment benefit, the classified employees got their short-term disability plan, effective Sept. 1.
The UA System’s board of trustees approved the shortterm disability plan in July, system spokesman Ben Beaumont said Wednesday. To date, no other system campuses have adopted one, but several areconsidering it. The modified work-assignment benefit didn’t require board action and “was implemented by a campus-level policy at Fayetteville.”
The short-term disability insurance plan offers partial salary replacement protection for periods of unpaidleave taken because of illness, injury or childbirth, but only for the patient, not the patient’s spouse. The Fayetteville campus’s classified employees are automatically enrolled in the “basic shortterm disability” plan, which covers their annual salaries, not to exceed $45,000, and is 100 percent paid by the campus, according to its website. A July letter from UA System President Donald R. Bobbitt to trustees estimates the cost for this coverage in Fayetteville at $221,000.
The cost of offering the work-assignment benefit is not as easy to estimate, since it is not an insurance policy and it’s too early to determine how well-used it will be, officials said.
The short-term disability plan - which officials said the university has not offered before - also has provisions where classified workers can purchase higher coverage beyond what the university pays on their behalf, and other employees can buy their own optional coverages.
Janine Parry, chairman of UA’s faculty senate and the mother of twins born in 2006, is particularly happy about the university’s new policies.
“That is something I’ve worked on and been upset about, really, for 15 years at the university, and this provost [Sharon Gaber] worked really hard to fix it last year, and the HR people and the staff senate,” Parry said.
Most faculty are ninemonth appointees, Parry said, so many people assume they should just have their babies in the summer, or choose May, early January or late December to give birth.
Parry and Jack Lyons said it’s difficult to shift teaching responsibilities in the middle of a semester, especially for upper-level courses in which a particular professor has authored the curriculum. Also, at one sick day earned a month nine times a year, they said it can take five years to accrue enough leave for maternity, and that’s if a person never uses a sick day. And faculty careers tend to start late, too.
Before the policy, some department chairmen would work with faculty members to modify their teaching schedule, as happened with the Lyons, but Parry noted: “It was not universitywide. It was not standard operating procedure.” And the lack of consistency put the university at risk legally, she said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 11/01/2013