The Ongoing Fight for Paid FMLA

The Real Cost of Outdated Family Leave Policies

Lincoln Education Association member Nora Lenz, a 30-year classroom veteran, has the kind of career lawmakers praise in resolutions and speeches. By all accounts, Nora has done what teachers are always told to do: be dependable, be steady, be there for students. But when her parents’ health collapsed, reliability became a trap. Because in Nebraska, for too many educators, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is protection on paper and punishment in practice.

Impossible Choices
In the summer of 2019, Nora’s mother moved into a nursing home. Her father, still in good health at the time, stayed in his home. The family made a decision that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever watched a parent decline: Her mother should never be alone. Nora took the Friday-through-Sunday shifts, building her weekends around a nursing home 150 miles away. She did it while teaching full-time, absorbing the travel, the exhaustion, and the emotional weight because that is what families do when the system gives them no other choice.

Then January 2020 arrived, and with it, her father’s illness. His health declined rapidly. She described watching him lose the will to live. The clock was running out, but she could not afford to stop hers. The bills did not pause because her parents needed her. So, she did what educators do. She kept going. She was with her father for the last four days of his life. She held his hand as he took his last breath. And then she said the part that should haunt anyone who sets policy for working families: 

“I truly believe that if I had been able to take even a short leave from work, he might have lived longer,” Nora told lawmakers. 

Seventeen days after her father died, her mother died, too. This is the kind of loss you carry long after the moment is over.

Nebraska lawmakers can say FMLA exists. They can say teachers can take time off. But “can” is meaningless when it comes with a pay cut big enough to destabilize a household. A benefit that requires you to risk your rent, your mortgage or your groceries is not a benefit. It is a gamble. 

NSEA Fighting for FMLA
In the spring of 2025, when Nora shared her story before the Education Committee, it felt like forward momentum in the Nebraska State Education Association’s push for paid FMLA for educators. LB440, originally introduced by Sen. Ashlei Spivey to create the Education Leave and Support Act, was prioritized but struggled to gain traction on its own. Instead, it advanced only as part of a larger committee amendment that bundled it with unrelated proposals—an approach that drew resistance from senators and prevented a focused debate on paid leave for teachers.

Lawmakers raised concerns about the cost of adding another payroll-based assessment, while others argued that paid FMLA should remain a topic for local collective bargaining rather than statewide policy. The bill stalled and, in the months that followed, NSEA worked with lawmakers to craft an amendment aimed at addressing those concerns. At the same time, hundreds of local associations drafted paid FMLA proposals to bring to their bargaining tables. According to NSEA Collective Bargaining Specialist Jen Dubas, none of those proposals resulted in adopted policies, and in some districts the ideas were labeled nonstarters before negotiations even began.

Every year Nebraska debates how to recruit and retain educators while districts compete with industries offering stronger benefits. Meanwhile teachers look at their lives—real lives with births and deaths and cancer and caregiving—and they do the math. Many leave. Some decide to never enter the profession.

If the state is serious about keeping skilled educators in classrooms, it cannot keep asking them to sacrifice their families to prove their commitment to students.

Protection Gap
Lexie Wiseman expected long days, careful planning and the dedication that comes with working with children and families. What she did not expect was that becoming a mother—or facing a medical crisis—would require years of saving leave just to stay financially afloat.

A speech-language pathologist with Educational Service Unit 10 (ESU 10), Lexie is nine years into a career serving students from birth to age 21 while raising four children of her own. For educators like her, even joyful milestones like childbirth begin with a calculation: How many sick days can I afford to use? She built up nearly three years of leave before starting her family, knowing maternity leave often means paying yourself with days you have saved.

During her first pregnancy, Lexie learned at a 20-week ultrasound that her baby had congenital heart disease. The next day, she returned to work because she had no leave to spare. 

“I didn’t have the opportunity to just sit with my emotions,” she said. 

Months later, her infant required lifesaving open-heart surgery, forcing her to take unpaid time off. 

“My son is fighting for his life in the hospital… and I’m not getting paid,” she said.

Lexie loves her work and the students who keep her grounded, but her story underscores a larger truth: paid FMLA is not an abstract policy debate. It is the difference between focusing on a child’s surgery and worrying about a paycheck that never arrives.

The Caregiving Gap
Omaha Education Association (OEA) President Kathy Poehling didn’t testify before lawmakers to talk about pregnancy. She came to talk about the parts of life educators carry quietly—the foster children who need stability, and the moments when teaching collides with responsibility at home and the system offers little more than unpaid days and impossible choices.

More than two decades ago, Kathy and her husband became foster parents to a toddler. The child was just 22 months old and had endured abuse in nearly every form imaginable. For three and a half years, Kathy’s family provided stability. Then the state returned the child to her biological parent. Two months later, she was back in foster care, moving through 10 different homes over the next three and a half years while Kathy and her husband fought quietly, persistently, to bring her back.

When that call finally came, Kathy had just begun her teaching career. Like many new educators, she had no leave built up. But trauma does not wait for contract language in a negotiated agreement. 

“I still had to take her to Project Harmony. I still had to take her to numerous medical appointments, and on top of that, therapy twice a week,” Kathy said. 

She described receiving just $200 a month to help support the child while absorbing the emotional and financial strain herself. 

Zero Dollar Paychecks
In 2021, OEA member Raeanna (Rae) Carlson and her husband made a move many teachers make for opportunity and growth. They left Niobrara for Omaha, trading six years of accumulated leave for a fresh start. On paper, those six years should have meant more than 50 days of sick leave. In reality, chronic illness and the everyday exposures that come with working in a school had already chipped away at that balance.

Her health story began years earlier with a kidney disease diagnosis and other medical challenges she continues to manage. Like countless educators, she kept working through appointments and flare-ups because teaching rarely allows space for long absences.

When she arrived in Omaha Public Schools, she was rebuilding everything from the ground up—new classroom, new district, new leave bank. She was also pregnant.

As a new teacher in the district, Rae received 10 sick days. After that, the remaining weeks of maternity leave were unpaid. She described opening paychecks that read zero dollars. Colleagues told Rae to keep the paychecks and apply for assistance.

“Some teachers had told me they used those checks to get on WIC to help offset the cost of a newborn and unpaid leave,” Rae said. 

The financial strain was not the result of reckless choices or poor planning. It was the result of taking time to recover from childbirth—time the system acknowledges as necessary but refuses to support financially. 

Where FMLA Stalled
This session, a refined version of LB440 paired with amendment AM1699 sought to address earlier concerns by removing the proposed payroll fee while requiring districts to provide up to six weeks of paid leave for qualifying FMLA events with local flexibility. The amendment protected educators’ existing sick days and excluded substitute costs from budget limits. Despite those changes, the standalone proposal has stalled, leaving lawmakers without a focused debate on paid FMLA for educators this year.

NSEA's Promise
NSEA leaders say the fight is far from over. President Tim Royers warned that if lawmakers fail to act, the organization is prepared to take the issue directly to voters through a petition drive.

“Our members can’t afford to wait while another session passes without paid FMLA,” Royers said. “It isn’t too expensive. What’s expensive is burnout. What’s expensive is turnover. What’s expensive is losing experienced teachers because we refused to build a system that acknowledges that life happens to educators, too. Paid FMLA is not a perk. It is dignity.”