One of the topics lawmakers will consider when they return to the Capitol next month is requiring businesses offer five paid sick days every year.
Every year it happens like clockwork. Sick kids show up at school because their parents can’t take time of work to care for them.
"You are going to be sick. Pretty much everybody in the classroom is going to get sick and it's going to happen more than once," says Thomas Calhoun, who taught elementary school in Norfolk for decades. And he says kids would often end up in the nurse’s office.
"And the nurses would call, and they just couldn't afford to take the day off. And they couldn't come until they got off work."
The Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy commissioned a poll of registered voters in Virginia that shows 62% admitted to sending a sick child to school because they did not have paid sick days. Kim Bobo is executive director of the center.
"Either people don't have any paid sick days or maybe they don't have enough, and so they go to work because people can't afford to lose the income," Bobo says. "That's what the polling shows."
The poll also shows 88% of registered voters are in favor of requiring employers to provide at least five paid sick days a year, a bill that lawmakers will be considering in January.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
