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.
