New law boosts parental involvement in school activities

Parents whose own annual back-to-school routines involve juggling work, school and family in a way that would wow even a Cirque du Soleil performer will have some help this year, courtesy of Nevada legislators.

A new state law that went into effect Aug. 15 gives parents, guardians and custodians of public and private school students the right to take off four hours of unpaid time per child per school year to participate in school activities. (Most schools in the Las Vegas Valley resume classes Monday.)

Parent-teacher conferences. Pitching in as a room mother or father. Such activities likely will be covered under the law, which prohibits employers from firing, demoting, suspending or otherwise discriminating against parents who choose to take advantage of it.

The new law actually represents an expansion of job protections that already exist under Nevada law. According to Rick Roskelley, a Las Vegas attorney with Littler Mendelson, Nevada law already prohibited employers from firing parents, guardians or custodians of public school students who took off from work to attend a conference requested by a school administrator. Similarly, existing state law protected parents who took off of work after being notified that their public school-attending child was involved in an emergency.

With Assembly Bill 243, which was signed into law in May, those protections are expanded to the parents, guardians and custodians of children enrolled in private, as well as public, schools.

The new law expands the range of events covered under existing law. According to Roskelley, the new law specifically covers parent-teacher conferences, school-related activities held during school hours and volunteering at school.

Roskelley says the law also "arguably" requires employers to grant parents up to four hours per school year of time off for such events as musical performances, science fairs, school plays, athletic events and class parties.

Leave, Roskelley notes, is "required as long as the activity is school-related."

One of the bill's sponsors, Assemblywoman April Mastroluca, D-Henderson, said similar laws already are on the books in several states. Some make the leave part of family medical leave laws, she said, while others offer as much as 12 to 15 hours per school year.

"But what it comes down to is, over 20 years of research show that parental involvement has a positive effect on children's education," says Mastroluca, who also works as a staff member for the National PTA. Studies "have proven kids are much more likely to graduate high school and go on to college and are less likely to experiment with drugs or alcohol when parents are involved in their educations."

Throughout the deliberative process, lawmakers worked with business representatives to make the new law "as equitable as we could," Mastroluca adds.

For example, the law provides for unpaid leave, and for a maximum of four hours of leave per child per school year. According to Roskelley, the law allows an employer to require that employees submit a written request for leave five school days before the event, and allows employers to require employees to offer documentation that they did, indeed, attend the event for which they took time off.

The law requires that the leave be pre-approved and mutually agreed-upon, which, Mastroluca says, will allow employers to make staffing adjustments.

In addition, the law applies only to companies that have 50 or more employees. And, Mastroluca says, the law requires that leave be taken in increments of at least one hour "to make it less of a hardship for employers in scheduling, so (an employee) didn't take 10 minutes off each Friday for six months."

Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman Cara Roberts said the chamber supported the bill.

"We were able to work with lawmakers to amend it a bit so that it was a bill that was positive for both employees and employers," she says.

However, as with any new law, there probably will be a shakeout period. For instance, the law requires that leave be mutually agreed upon but, Roskelley notes, it doesn't describe how such agreement might be reached.

In addition, Roskelley says, the law requires that the leave be unpaid, even though requiring exempt employees -- those in, for example, administrative or executive, as well as some salaried, positions -- to take unpaid leave may conflict with federal law.

Another important caveat: The law doesn't apply to employees who are covered by collective bargaining agreements if the union contract provides, Roskelley says, "substantially similar" protections.

For unionized employees, he adds, "I would look at this as being the floor, basically."

The law may present smaller companies, in particular, with practical staffing challenges.

"If you have a company on the smaller side, barely a 50-employee company, and you've got a category of employees that maybe only has two or three employees in it, what if they all want off at the same time?" Roskelley says. "They're all involved in a football game or band rehearsal or something. Now you're down to nobody."

Even trickier: What if a husband and wife work for the same company, or even in the same department? "Do they let them both off or just one of them?" Roskelley says.

Roskelley says that, as of a week before the law was to take effect, he hadn't heard much about it from human resources people, possibly because, by the time they'd heard about it, the law already had been passed.

Human resources departments in larger companies "already are aware of school leave, so this is just another level to incorporate into their companies," he notes. "My concern would be for the smaller ones. Once you get around 50 employees, a lot of companies that size can't afford to have a full-time human resources person. There are probably a lot of employers out there that aren't aware of it yet."

However, for some, the law may mean nothing more than codifying already existing informal practice.

"I did have some employers that said: 'Well, we're already flexible. We already let employees take time off,' " Mastroluca says.

There may well be a "growing pain" or two, Roberts says, but "my experience is that most employers want to be able to accommodate their employees, particularly when it comes to something as important as parenting.

"I think what this law puts in place for most employers is more of a formal system that sets some good ground rules."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.