California public school teacher Mollie Blustein planned her pregnancy so that her daughter would arrive during summer break. But when the elementary school teacher went into premature labor and delivered her baby two weeks before the end of school, she faced another stressor: a huge pay cut.
The majority of California’s roughly 300,000 teachers don’t have access to the state-funded paid leave program that most new parents in the private sector do. Instead, many local school districts deduct the cost of a substitute teacher from educators’ pay during parental leave.
Because her daughter arrived before the school year ended, Blustein used 10 of her accrued sick days — paid time off she wanted to bank for later to bond with her baby or to care for her if she got sick.
Now, California lawmakers have given public school and community college employees up to 14 weeks of paid pregnancy leave in the education bill accompanying the state’s new budget, after Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed the provision this year.
It’s a reversal for Newsom in his final year in office. In 2019, the governor vetoed a bill that would have given school employees at least six weeks of paid leave, and he did not publicly support a similar Assembly bill that died on the Senate floor in 2024. Several analysts said the issue appeals to voters on both sides of the aisle, ahead of Newsom’s potential 2028 presidential run.
State Department of Finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer said in an email that “educator workforce recruitment and retention has been a priority for the administration since the governor’s first day in office” but that the funding was not previously available.
Paid leave policies for educators and other state workers have garnered bipartisan support in recent years, including in conservative-led states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, and blue states such as New Jersey, Washington, and Oregon, said Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow specializing in gender equity and paid leave at the think tank New America.
After the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, some conservative lawmakers in states that banned abortion embraced paid leave for public employees to signal support for babies after they were born, Shabo said. Many limited the benefit to state employees and framed it as a tool to recruit and retain them.
Elizabeth Gedmark, a vice president at A Better Balance, a nonprofit that advocates for workplace equality, said paid leave “polls incredibly well across all political lines, because everyone agrees that you shouldn’t have to go back to work a day after you had a baby.”
In 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that gave federal workers 12 weeks of paid leave. But Shabo said the current administration hasn’t made any moves to expand paid leave.
Palmer, of the Department of Finance, said the state can now afford the roughly $218 million leave program because of billions of dollars in unexpected tax revenue, largely from personal income taxes tied to tech workers’ stock options. Much of that revenue is constitutionally guaranteed to schools, so it can’t cover other public workers who are also shut out of California’s paid leave system.
Many school district administrators have largely opposed paid leave in the past because of the cost. The state’s plan calls for districts to pay for the leave out of their annual cost-of-living raise, which this year is bigger than the law requires.
David Roth, superintendent of Buckeye Union School District in El Dorado County, said the math still isn’t great for some schools, and that “the real value reaching the classroom is smaller than the headline number suggests.”
The California Association of School Business Officials had opposed previous related legislation, saying it would create an “unfunded mandate,” but largely supports the new plan now that the start date has been pushed from July 1 to January 2027. The organization’s chief governmental relations officer, Sara Pietrowski, said concerns remain but that the group would work with the state to avoid additional fiscal challenges.
The proposal would close a gap that many Californians don’t realize exists. The state was one of the first to offer paid family leave — under its current program, eligible workers get up to 90% of their pay for up to 20 weeks of combined leave and disability benefits.
But most California teachers, 72% of whom are women, are shut out. The program is funded through a payroll deduction for state disability insurance, and public agencies are exempt from it. Districts can opt in, but the move must be bargained collectively, as recently happened in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Most educators must use up their accrued sick days before receiving a fraction of their pay for the remainder of their leave, under a provision of the education code.
Because of that, it’s not uncommon for teachers to plan their pregnancy leave for summer breaks to try to avoid burning up their sick leave. But that can be challenging for those who have pregnancy complications or early deliveries, like Blustein, or those who experience challenges getting pregnant.
Erika Jones, an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles and the secretary-treasurer of the California Teachers Association, said her colleagues routinely teach until they go into labor, which can be disruptive.
It took one colleague around seven years to bank 77 sick days to use for a single pregnancy.
“Women go back sooner than they should have, because they don’t have the days,” Jones said. “You end up in this deficit zone.”