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Rick and Dan,

Your comments are just as misleading and misinformed as all other sources. If I may break this down for you both STATISTICALLY:

First Rick, you cannot simply take the number of total absent days and divide it by the number of teachers, it simply doesn't represent the data properly. The average needs to be weighted appropriately. In the article it states that 3%of these teachers has some type of long term illness that kept them out of school for 70+ days. How many days is that?!?!Without knowing the exact number of days these teachers were out, and assuming that they all were out 75% of the school year for anything from Cancer to a broken ankle (Think Gordon Hayward) you could easily overestimate the total number of the true population of teachers by more than 5,700 days! lets just assume for a minute that each of these teachers were out 90 days (half a year and I think fair to assume given the information. That now leaves you with 2,880 less sick days to average into the pool, and 32 less teachers to factor into the average (they're the outliers anyway. In statistics, we look at them to see if there is anything there but a weighted average would factor them out of the nominal curve). Now were at 835/9412 or 11.27 sick days, just shy of 2 weeks. Still a bit high? How about factoring in the above average class room sizes where you are exposed to anywhere between 25-32 disease spreading children for 6-8 hours per day (here is some research back facts on this being a hazard and concern for us all:

http://www.futurity.org/why-kids-top-the-list-for-spreading-germs/

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050074

This is all not to mention that no parent is keeping their kid home when their sick anymore. And I haven't factored in the continued air quality and learning conditions of our schools.

So I now ask you, is 11 days away from school too much? I think not.

Second point Dan- When you make mention that teachers are paid 70 days full salary for their sick time, you fail to mention that it is merely a long term loan. What you didn't say was that at the end of the year (see above article) teachers with elongated sick time pay back a strong percentage of their wages earned during that time. That is not getting paid full wages. But, its a truly common practice in the industry. Here's a fun exercise... Go to google and enter this:

sick leave bank guidelines

In addition to a number of state school districts, there is a sick bank for CT state workers (www.ct.gov/opm/lib/opm/OLR/Forms/P4GUIDELINES.doc), The employees for the state of Tennessee (https://www.tn.gov/assets/entities/hr/.../Employee_Sick_Leave_Bank_Guidelines.pdf) and even one for our RI state workers (http://www.hr.ri.gov/documents/Handbook/leave/1300_Sick%20Leave%20Banks_9-22-2010.pdf) which is a supplemental 12 days BEYOND their short term and long term disability insurances.

I close in asking you all to be more diligent in your research and investigation into such matters as they will prove that there is actual concern for these teachers and what they are trying to accomplish. Moreover, it saddens me to see such emotional responses without fact from people who have obvious political aspirations and care too little to fully educate themselves before speaking.