MADISON, Wis. – Before Act 10, local teachers unions in Wisconsin were allowed to negotiate all types of workplace rules, including the number of paid sick and personal days allowed for teachers.

That resulted in a lot of very generous absence polices, which in turn led to a lot of teacher absences, a lot of money spent on substitutes, and a lot of lost learning time for students.

But thanks to Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s public sector collective bargaining reform law, school administrators are now allowed to implement policies that benefit students rather than employees, without union interference.

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Numerous districts took advantage of that new freedom to rewrite paid absence policies and cut down the number of days teachers can miss while still drawing salary.

Suddenly many teachers have improved attendance records, and schools are saving a lot of money on substitute costs.

It was simply a matter of removing the financial incentive for teachers to miss more days than necessary.

As the Center for American Progress noted in a recent report on teacher absences, “Teachers are the most important school-based determinant of students’ academic success. It’s no surprise … that teacher absence lowers student achievement.

“Second, (education) resources are scarce, and any excess of funds tied up in teacher absence, which costs at least $4 billion annually (across the nation), should be put to better use.”

School leaders in Wisconsin’s Hamilton school district are obviously well-aware of this fact, and have used Act 10 to keep the best teachers in front of students as much as possible.

In the Hamilton district, for example, officials reduced teachers’ annual 12 days of sick leave and three days of emergency leave to a total of seven days, the district’s human resources director, John Roubik, told EAGnews.

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The changes, implemented in the 2011-12 school year, had a significant impact on the number of teacher absences, as well as the total costs for substitute teachers.

Hamilton’s educators missed a total of 3,044 days in the 2009-10 school year, and 2,954 in 2010-11, but those figures dropped dramatically to 1,852 in 2011-12, 2,024 in 2012-13, and 1,391 last school year.

Substitute costs also went down, from $471,312 in 2009-10 and $455,422 in 2010-11 to $324,880 in 2011-12, $338,540 in 2012-13 and $338,337 in 2013-14, according to figures provided by Roubik.

“I do think it’s affected the district in a positive way,” Roubik said.

“The system we’ve moved to rewards good attendance, and in the past it didn’t,” Denise Dorn Lindberg, a spokeswoman for Hamilton schools, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel shortly after the change. “That helps us cut the costs of substitutes and increase teachers’ contact time with students.”

Beyond the reduction in the allotted teacher leave days, Hamilton officials also reduced the number of unused leave days teachers can accumulate for extended illness, or reimbursement upon retirement, from 75 days over the course of their careers to a maximum of 30, Roubik said.

The district didn’t take away accumulated days from current teachers, Roubik said, but the lower threshold is expected to reduce the cost of that benefit as new teachers are phased in.

It was a similar story in the Elmbrook school district, said chief information officer Chris Thompson.

“When Act 10 came into place we had an opportunity as a district to identify our core values. One of those values for us was keeping our highly qualified teachers in front of students as much as possible,” Thompson said.

Elmbrook officials initially cut annual teacher sick days in half for the 2012-13 school year, from roughly 12 to 15 days per year to seven, but school officials are again reworking the policy.

“When we went down to seven we found a threshold that many more teachers were reaching that level, so we went back up to nine” in the district’s recently approved handbook, Thompson said.

Beyond teacher sick days, Elmbrook schools also revised teachers’ discretionary and personal days off, lumping them in with sick leave.

“We’ve re-categorized things,” Thompson said. “Two years ago if your child was sick you had to use a discretionary day, now we’ve changed that so those are sick days.”

This year, teachers received seven sick days and four discretionary days, but two discretionary days will move to sick leave, for a total of nine sick days and two discretionary days annually for each teacher, starting next year, he said.

While Thompson insisted the changes were “certainly not an opportunity for us to shore up behavior,” and stressed that the district’s educators “are committed to our students,” the new policy has had a very positive effect, both in terms of teacher attendance and substitute costs.

In 2009-10 and 2010-11, Elmbrook’s roughly 550 teachers took about 10,000 total leave days each year, but that number dropped drastically to about 7,700 for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years. Thompson said the district’s substitutes are paid about $100 per day on average, which works out to a savings of roughly $230,000 per year.

Like Hamilton, Elmbrook schools also implemented a new cap on accrued unused sick time that will likely reap further savings in the future. All district employees, including teachers, were capped at 90 unused sick days in 2011-12 (with new staff capped at 30) but that policy was readjusted to 60 days last school year to align with the number allowed by long-term disability, Thompson said.

Brown Deer is another Wisconsin school district that adjusted its teacher leave policy in the wake of Act 10, but it hasn’t had the impact officials were hoping for.

School leaders reduced employee sick leave from 12 days to 10, but simultaneously increased the number of personal days off from one to two.

“These changes may have been a mistake, since not all staff take their sick days, but most of them take their personal days and our cost for substitutes for absences of this type has increased noticeably,” district spokeswoman Emily Koczela wrote in an email.

Fortunately, Brown Deer school officials can now implement policy revisions much faster without the unnecessary burden of union collective bargaining, thanks to Act 10.

“On the bright side, Act 10 allows us to reverse course on this if we conclude it was a poor decision,” Koczela said.