Sick Leave

Policy Statement

Durham Technical Community College provides all eligible employees with paid sick leave.

Procedure

Sick leave is granted to eligible Durham Technical Community College (Durham Tech) employees to cover loss of time incurred due to illness or injury, medical and dental appointments, quarantines due to contagious disease, mental health, and temporary disability. Sick leave may also be used for the illness of an immediate family member. Eligible employees earn sick leave if they work or are on paid leave for one-half or more of the regularly scheduled workdays in any month. Full-time employees working thirty (30) to thirty-nine (39) hours per week earn sick leave on a prorated basis. Part-time hourly contracted employees do not earn paid sick leave. Time taken for sick leave must be reported in the Employee Leave System.

The amount of time deducted from an employee’s sick bank should equal the amount of time they were scheduled to work. If an employee’s work schedule is eight (8) hours or more on a day they are absent, the amount of time they are scheduled to work should be deducted from their sick bank hours requested and reported should equal the length of the employee’s ACTUAL workday for full days taken, or for the actual hours used. 

Employees working 40 hours per week earn four hundred and eighty (480) minutes or eight (8) hours of sick leave for each month of employment. Sick leave may be taken and reported in quarter-hour (15-minute) increments.

Sick leave is often unpredictable and does not require prior approval from your supervisor. Absences requiring sick leave for more than three (3) workdays, non-consecutive and within a period of 10 workdays, will require documentation from your healthcare team. Absences requiring sick leave of 10 workdays or greater will require the employee to follow the FMLA Process.

Employees must exhaust all sick, annual, and bonus leave before they can take “Leave without Pay.” Employees may go up to forty (40) hours in the negative in their leave bank without taking leave without pay. Having a 40-hour negative balance is not to be an ongoing practice and cannot be carried forward to the next fiscal year. If an employee’s leave bank is in the negative at the end of June, the employee’s pay will be deducted to bring his or her balance back to zero (0).

An employee who separates from the College does not receive payment for any remaining sick leave. Sick time counts towards the employee’s state service time and is held in the employee’s leave bank for up to five (5) years. If an employee is retiring, their sick leave counts towards state service. If an employee separating from the College is not retiring, they will forfeit sick time unless they transfer to another state facility or retire within five (5) years of separation.

Definitions

For the purposes of this policy, an immediate family member is a spouse, domestic partner, child, stepchild, mother, father, stepmother, stepfather, brother, stepbrother, sister, stepsister, grandparent, grandchild, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. In-law relationships are also considered immediate family.

For the purposes of this policy, eligible employees are permanent full-time employees who work thirty (30) or more hours per week.