The requirement to give employees up to 10 days or 80 hours of paid sick leave if they or someone they cared for became sick with COVID-19 expired Dec. 31, 2020, even as the disease continued to spread throughout the country.

This month, the Limestone County Board of Education and Limestone County Commission each decided that even if it wasn’t required, employees with each entity could still rely on that benefit to help make ends meet if they were unable to work due to COVID-19.

Limestone County Schools Superintendent Randy Shearouse said during the school board’s Jan. 12 meeting that the school system was encouraged to extend through the end of March, but “we feel like, as a system, we need to extend it to the end of the school year.”

The extension is primarily for employees who did not use the sick leave option before the original expiration date. They now have the option available through the end of the 2020-2021 school year.

The Limestone County Commission also approved an extension through the end of June, according to Commission Chairman Collin Daly. The measure was approved during the commission’s Jan. 19 meeting, but Daly discussed it with school board members during their meeting, too.

He said the Association of County Commissions of Alabama had encouraged county commissions to put the sick leave option back into effect on “good faith” that they would later be reimbursed by the federal government for any related costs.

“Right now, we have a couple employees out, and they are having to use their personal time, so we’re making it retroactive to Jan. 1,” Daly said at the school board meeting. “We will go back and reimburse their sick leave.”

However, as the pandemic continues, so does the potential for employees to need that sick leave option more than once. Board member Bret McGill noted there are employees within the school system that cannot work remotely but may end up quarantined multiple times due to close contact and are forced to use up any sick leave they may have.

As a result, when an employee does get sick, they may be forced to choose between not being able to pay bills or hiding their symptoms to make sure they can still earn a paycheck.

“We don’t want to encourage employees to come to work sick,” McGill said. “That’s what I’m scared of.”

Daly said this concern had also weighed on his mind. The county employs about 270 people, of which only about 70 had used the COVID-19 sick leave as of the school board meeting, according to the commission chairman.

“The reason we’re extending it is, from my side of it, is that it wouldn’t be fair to the 200 other employees that might be the bus driver or the custodian, that doesn’t have the leave time,” Daly told the school board. “We hire employees all the time at the jail that don’t get sick leave until they’ve been there six months. … If you have an employee that doesn’t have leave time, they’re not going to get a pay period. They’re not going to get to play their house payment or whatever.”

How best to handle the situation, though, remains uncertain. Among the suggestions discussed during LCBOE’s meeting were offering 10 additional days of paid sick leave and only covering situations in which it could be proven the exposure happened at work.

“I’m not asking for people to abuse it, but we’ve got to come up with something to help the folks out that can’t (work from home),” McGill said.

Bill Tribble, LCS’ executive director of human resources, and Shearouse agreed covering leave due to exposure at school was an idea worth discussing. Shearouse said he knows there will be some situations where it might not be clear where exposure happened, “but there are others, because our nurses did contact tracing, they know it.”

“If we send them home as a school system … then we should cover that,” Tribble said. “That’s not fault of an employee’s.”

Tribble told the board that LCS was currently working to figure out how many employees have needed to be sent home multiple times so far, though he didn’t think it was many.