Oklahoma higher ed workers navigating gaps in paid parental leave

Marci Deck recently became a mom of three. She’s been back to work for two months as an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Community Medicine in Tulsa after her daughter, Elliott, was born.

OU implemented six weeks of paid leave for benefits-eligible employees this month. But the policy came too late for Deck. She received two weeks of paid leave and covered the rest with all of her accrued paid time off (PTO).

“It was just one day that I got unpaid, so I was pretty thrilled,” Deck said. “The downside of that being, now, I’m stuck back at zero PTO, and I’m trying to climb my way back up for the holidays when my kids are out of school.”

She’s trying to excel in work and motherhood, but she said she always feels like she’s “letting one of them down.”

“One day it's like I could have put in more work towards X, Y, Z at the office,” Deck said. “Or one day it's, ‘I killed it at work. But like, man, I didn't even check in with my son today.’”

Of the 25 colleges and universities in the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education , only six offer paid parental leave. Institutions without these policies rely on the Family and Medical Leave Act , which allows employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year. They can take unpaid time or dip into their PTO, which can incentivize an earlier return to work.

Most institutions with paid leave only began offering it in the last few years. Some say it’s too expensive, but others have decided the cost is worth it, especially for recruitment.

A balancing act

Becky Henthorn is the provost at Tishomingo’s Murray State College, which began offering eight weeks of paid leave for mothers and four weeks for fathers last year. The nearly 3,000-student college has the longest leave policy in Oklahoma, and employees only have to work there for 60 days to take advantage of it.

“We’re competing against companies like Google and Apple that have, not 40 days, but some of them, 18, 20 weeks of leave,” Henthorn said. “When we look at the younger generations that are coming in and starting to work, the work-life balance thing is very important for them.”

Maintaining employees through family-friendly policies is important to the college, which she said has a retention rate of over 90%. The challenge with relying on accrued leave is most employees who have children are younger and haven’t had time to build enough.

The postpartum period lasts at least six to eight weeks , and without outside resources, she said it’s nearly impossible to continue work before then.

The idea of unpaid parental leave was “mind-boggling” to Jami Houston when she moved to work at OU in 2016. Houston, who is now the director of student success programs at Southwestern Illinois College , spent years advocating for OU to implement paid parental leave in her role with its staff senate. OU adopted its two-week policy after she left in 2022.

“Honestly, when we first moved there, [getting pregnant] was one of my biggest fears. … We couldn't afford it, and we had no family there to help with child care, and it wasn't something we wanted to do,” Houston said

Andrea Jilling, a former Oklahoma State University assistant professor of environmental soil chemistry, taught at OSU while it offered only FMLA. It began offering paid parental leave in January — six weeks for primary caregivers and three weeks for secondary.

Jilling waited two years to get pregnant so she could accrue enough sick leave to get paid during her FMLA period.

She said she was lucky to have a Career-Life Balance Supplement grant through the National Science Foundation, which gave her financial support to keep her lab running while she was on leave. But she still had a text thread of colleagues in her lab for urgent matters during the weeks after she gave birth.

Jilling said she mostly had time with her daughter during her leave, but she was somewhat resentful throughout because, as the expert in her field, it was difficult for people to fill her place.

“The trickiest part was managing returning to all these projects that are now months behind and overdue or students that need a little more support so I can catch them up and papers that are behind,” Jilling said. “There's just so much [to] catch up [on], while you're also trying to move your program forward, you feel behind. You're behind on your trajectory to tenure. ... And it's all due to having a baby, which I wish it didn't cause that sort of deficit in your professional life.”

Jilling said employees should be supported through policies that help them when they return to work and fund the hiring of temporary staff or faculty to fill in teaching and research needs.

Now, Jilling works as an assistant professor of environmental soil science at the University of South Carolina, which provides six weeks of paid leave to mothers . She said having that time would have been a game-changer.

“[It] would have allowed me to have more sick leave remaining, like any amount of sick leave remaining that I could use if other sort of incidents or things came up, say, in the following year or two. … It’s also just the principle, the symbolism of it all to know that the institution wants to support parents,” Jilling said.

Legislative momentum

The push for paid parental leave is also coming from lawmakers. Outgoing Sen. Jessica Garvin, R-Duncan, got paid maternity leave for state employees across the finish line two sessions ago through a policy she introduced that became Senate Bill 16 . Legislation granting six weeks of paid leave for K-12 teachers also passed that year .

Garvin learned that to include higher education workers in Oklahoma’s state employee leave policy, there would have to be a constitutional change. So, she authored Senate Bill 1278 this year to bring them into the fold.

It got through the Senate but stalled in the House. She said those who told her she’d get pushback were concerned maternity leave was a Democratic priority, but she said it’s an “everyone issue.”

“We can’t just be pro-birth in the state of Oklahoma. If we’re going to be pro-birth, we need to be pro-life,” Garvin said. “And, we use that phrase a lot about being pro-life, but you have to put your money where your mouth is.”

State employee paid leave was estimated to cost $3 million annually to provide six weeks to the average number of eligible state employees who have or adopt a child every year. Garvin’s bill estimates costs for higher education might approach $2.5 million .

Rep. Nick Archer, R-Elk City, co-authored SB 1278. Because Garvin lost her primary, he told StateImpact he will carry a university employee maternity leave bill again next year.

“We’ve not done a great job of supporting families in the state, and it’s time we do it,” Archer said.

After sailing through the Senate, last session’s bill passed the 31-member House Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee unanimously but was never heard in the House Committee on Common Education. He said the momentum ground to a halt because “somebody in leadership decided it wasn’t the best idea.”

After the bill was lobbied against “very hard,” Archer said he was told it would not have the support of at least 51 Republican members and would not be heard on the floor, so it did not advance to the education committee.

Sydney Stover, director of benefits at the University of Central Oklahoma, said there are barriers to paid parental leave at UCO because of financial limits. The university currently operates with FMLA and a policy where supervisors can apply for leave on behalf of their FMLA-eligible employees to extend their pay through recovery after birth. But, the employees must exhaust their PTO to be eligible.

Stover said she sees value in paid parental leave, and a bill like Garvin’s would help UCO extend the benefit.

“If that bill were to pass … that additional funding would assist because we're in this space right now where we're having to be really careful about any mandatory increases,” Stover said.

A 2023 higher education retention survey found fewer than half of employees are satisfied with their institution’s parental leave and child care benefits. The College of University Professional Association for Human Resources says improving these benefits helps target employees under 45 who are the most at risk for leaving.

The trend is there : From 2017-18 to 2023-24, paid leave for biological mothers has increased from 25% of institutions to 49%.

Marci Deck said she feels proud to work at an institution doing more to support working parents. She hopes more Oklahoma universities and colleges will provide the benefit because navigating the balance is tough.

But, she said her family comes first at the end of the day.

“I kind of have always told my husband, I want my kids to think of me as their mom who also happened to work, and not a working woman that also had kids,” Deck said.

As the momentum around paid parental leave in Oklahoma grows, colleges and universities are gradually joining the fold. And if the state takes the issue up next year, more families like the Decks will get some support during life’s big milestones.

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This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma higher ed workers navigating gaps in paid parental leave