Absentee Rate Has LAUSD Worried

About 7% of Los Angeles Unified School District employees are absent from work on any given day, a number that is much higher than national averages and is triggering concern about the $172 million spent last year to hire substitute teachers and other replacements, according to a report released Thursday.

As a result, officials are calling for changes in the ways the district discourages -- or inadvertently encourages -- employee absenteeism. But that could take a lot of negotiating with unions and possible changes in state law to prevent abuses.

The district study represents the first time the nation’s second-largest school system has seriously considered its absentee rate, said L.A. Unified Chief Operating Officer Tim Buresh, who presented it to a school board committee.

“There is cause for great pause here,” Buresh said. “I am concerned with our absolute level. I am concerned with the fact that it is increasing. That has a potentially huge impact on the education of the children and a huge cost impact for us.”

The absence rate for employees such as principals and teachers, labeled “certificated” in education-speak, was 6.9% in 2002-03. The rate for classified employees, a broad term that includes everyone from office clerks to cafeteria workers to bus drivers, was 7.6% that same year. While most of the district’s nearly 97,000 employees have good attendance records, about 11,000 have been absent more than 20 days in each of the last five years, according to Buresh.

Federal statistics in the report put the lost work-time rate for employees in education services at 1.6% nationwide and 2.3% for state employees in California. But other big-city school districts with strong unions have rates similar to those in Los Angeles: New York City’s teacher absentee rate is 6.2% and Chicago’s is 5%, according to published accounts of other studies.

Buresh said he didn’t consider the differences between Los Angeles and other large districts significant because they might involve different reporting methods. But he did suggest that Los Angeles’ climate sometimes makes the absentee rate climb as people take advantage of the sunshine to play hooky. Last Friday, 3,500 teachers called in sick and the district ran out of substitute teachers.

The district estimates that in the 2002-03 school year, it spent $172 million for overtime and substitute teachers and other replacements. Including lost work time, absenteeism cost the district about $432 million, the study found.

State law grants school employees about one sick day per month at full pay, or about 10 days a year for most teachers. They receive an additional 90 days sick time at half pay before they have to switch to long-term leave.

The law, said Buresh, creates problems for the district. “A lot of people can live quite well on half pay. It lends itself to abuse.”

Employees are considered absent when they take time off from work for illness, personal necessity, bereavement or jury duty. Vacation and holidays are not counted.

District officials said there is a direct link between the number of days a teacher is absent and student performance. Students of the most frequently absent teachers score notably worse on standardized tests, according to the report.

Principals say they are looking for ways to reduce teacher absenteeism.

Thomas G. Delgado, principal at Albion Street School, just north of downtown Los Angeles, said absenteeism “is a big disruption to the education program of students. It does affect students’ learning if they don’t have the same teacher over and over again.”

The report was welcomed by school board member Marlene Canter, who heads the district’s Human Resources Committee, which reviewed it Thursday. She said school employees must serve as role models for children and show up at work. “I feel that the human-relations part of our business ... directly impacts the classroom, and everything we do,” she said.

Buresh said he hoped to reduce the cost of absenteeism by half.

Among the proposals being considered by the district is a reexamination of its incentive plan. L.A. Unified spends about $2 million a year to encourage teachers to show up, partly with pay bonuses and partly with retirement accounts. Other school employees receive extra vacation days for not using sick days.

Sam Kresner, executive assistant to the president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said the $2 million in incentives “is peanuts.” But he stressed that the union is open to changes. “We want to talk about what are the underlying causes of absenteeism. We are trying to see if we can sit down with the district and find out what is causing illness,” he said.

Connie Moreno, labor relations representative for the California School Employees Assn., a union that represents office workers and other support staff, said she wasn’t surprised by the report and thought the Los Angeles district could do a better job of cutting absenteeism. “The district is so lax, there is no single policy,” she said.

In a year when the district has cut almost $500 million from its budget and is headed into what is expected to be contentious negotiations over benefits and compensation for employees, unions may be agreeable to finding ways to reduce absenteeism, Moreno said.

“If there could be savings that could definitely be applied to the increased cost of health benefits, I honestly believe you could get buy-in from every union in the district,” she said.

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Times staff writer Christiana Sciaudone contributed to this report.