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Town Employees May Soon Be Able To Pool Sick Time
By Keith Hagarty
Manchester employees may soon learn a new way of sharing. Sharing personal days, that is.
Municipal employees will soon have the option of taking days off, even if they used all of their personal days for the year, after the township council unanimously approved measures amending Manchester's personnel policies.
The purpose of the ordinance, passed by the council at its first reading last week, is to allow the approximate 200 township employees to donate any of their days of annually accrued sick, vacation and/or personal leave days into a pool of days to be used by other employees who have already exhausted all of the recipient' employee's accumulated time in the event of a catastrophic or serious illness or injury, the ordinance states.
Township Business Administrator Lauffer said such accommodations by employees have occurred in the past, but it was time for the town to get it on the books.
"We had this before in some kind of practice, but we had not formalized it," she said.
The ordinance was modeled after similar personnel policies adopted by the township board of education for school employees, as well as similar procedures in Dover Township.
The cooperative sick leave pool system is a way for township employees to help assist their fellow employees who may be facing a major sickness or personal problem and need more time off from work than what they are currently allotted, according to Lauffer.
In order to be eligible to request the excess sick day(s), the employee has to first be a participant in the program and donate their own leave time into the town's general sick leave bank. When an employee requests the supplemental leave time from the bank, their application request must include a physician's recommendation and be submitted to the employee's particular department head, who would then review the request and make a recommendation of approval or denial to the mayor or member of the council.
A public hearing and vote for final adoption of the ordinance is scheduled to take place at the council's next hearing on September 11.
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