California teachers will have to wait at least one more year for paid pregnancy leave.
Assembly Bill 65, which would have given school employees full pay if they missed work because of a pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth and recovery from these conditions, didn’t make it to a Senate hearing by the July 18 deadline.
Unless a rule waiver is granted, the legislation will not be considered this year, according to School Services of California.
The legislation, introduced by Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, D-Winters, would have required school districts and colleges to give teachers and other school staff up to 14 weeks of paid leave for a pregnancy.
Currently, teachers are exempt from paying into or benefiting from state disability insurance. They can take unpaid maternity leave, but most use vacation and sick time if they want paid leave.
Because this is the first year of the two-year legislative session, the legislation could be heard in 2026, but it will need to clear the Senate Education Committee and the Senate Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee if it is revived, according to School Services of California.
A similar bill proposed by Aguiar-Curry in February also failed to pass.
The California Teachers Association supported the bills. Erika Jones, CTA secretary-treasurer, said the union will continue to fight for pregnancy leave for its members in 2026.
“Teachers in California — the fourth largest economy in the world — have to pay out of our pockets to hire substitutes when we are out on leave with our newborn babies,” Jones said. “Too many are forced out of our profession early and the ones that do stay face a ‘pregnancy penalty’ as we near retirement, something male peers don’t experience. We have enough wealth in our state to invest in our public institutions; the time is now to fight forward for a better future.”
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar bill that would have given teachers and school staff at least six weeks of fully paid maternity leave, saying it would be too costly for school districts and colleges. The length of the leave would have been determined by the woman’s physician.
Former Gov. Jerry Brown also vetoed a paid maternity leave bill for school staff in 2018, saying that leave policies for school employees are best resolved through the collective bargaining process at the local level.
This story originally appeared in EdSource.