SPRINGFIELD - The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled a Wood Dale teacher who gave birth during the summer can’t split her paid maternity leave over two school years.
Wood Dale School District 7 granted teacher Margaret Dynak 1.5 days of paid leave at the end of the 2015-2016 school year, plus 12 weeks of unpaid time off under the Family Medical Leave Act at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year. But the school system balked at paying Dynak for the fall leave, which began when her infant was 10-weeks old.
Dynal then sued, contending the school district violated her rights under the law. While she found success in DuPage County Circuit Court, a split Illinois Second District Appellate Court panel rejected Dynak’s argument the school code’s 30 days of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child could be applied to any consecutive working days, no matter how many non-work days may fall between. Dynak noted the same code provides for three days of paid leave for a child’s illness, and also that fathers are entitled to leave for new children, indicating lawmakers recognized birth leave goes beyond a mother’s physical recovery to encompass family bonding and adjustment.
John Fester
| Scariano Himes and Petrarca
Chief Justice Anne M. Burke wrote the court’s April 16 opinion on Dynak’s appeal, with justices Rita B. Garman and Mary Jane Theis concurring. Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier concurred with a special opinion, joined by Justice Thomas L. Kilbride. Justices P. Scott Neville and Michael Burke took no part in the decision.
On appeal, Dynak noted the law governing paid leave for the death of a child stipulates the employee must complete such leave within 60 days of learning of the death, but the statutory language for births and adoptions contains no such clause. The justices disagreed, noting the law incorporates other express limits on the right to use paid sick leave for a new child.
The language of the law, such as the requirement of providing a medical certificate, “strongly suggests that the legislature intended that sick leave for birth must have a temporal connection to the birth,” Burke wrote. Furthermore, the opinion stated, “the only reasonable way to interpret the statute’s allowance of sick leave for personal illness, quarantine at home or serious illness or death in the immediate family or household is that the sick leave must be contemporaneous with the event.”
Not only would Dynak’s interpretation allow a worker to take time off in August to compensate for a death in the family in July, the panel suggested, but “a sick teacher could choose to come to work while sick, then take paid sick leave on future days when he or she is well. This result, too, is absurd.”
The panel further rejected Dynak’s argument that the law as written results in unequal treatment. Teachers who give birth during summer break don’t have to use accumulated sick days, which means the days can be used as needed during the school year or credited at retirement.
Karmeier’s special concurring opinion acknowledged the law’s provision for leave at the start of the formal adoption process “indicates the legislature’s intent to allow teachers to use their sick leave before, and not necessarily contemporaneously with or immediately following, the date of the adoption,” which is why workers aren’t required to provide evidence of a completed adoption.
Using strictly the lead opinion, Karmeier continued, a teacher couldn’t take time off for a day they showed up at the hospital to deliver a baby, or they might be forced to take bereavement leave immediately even if a funeral is scheduled a few days removed from the actual death.
Still, Karmeier wrote, the law in question doesn’t explicitly provide for Dynak’s specific interpretation, and so “to avoid the absurdities explained in the lead opinion, I agree that the use of sick leave for birth must have a reasonable temporal connection to the listed event.”
Dynak has been represented by attorneys Ryan M. Thoma, associate general counsel of the Illinois Education Association NEA; and Michael H. Slutsky, of Allison, Slutsky & Kennedy P.C., of Chicago.
The Wood Dale district has been represented by attorneys John E. Fester and Adam Daukaus, of Scariano, Himes and Petrarca, of Chicago.