When Orange County public school teacher Sasha Wallace gave birth to a baby boy last year, she knew that on a teachers’ salary, she couldn’t afford to stay off the job for long. The school district doesn’t offer paid maternity leave for educators who are trying to start a family, and she had bills to pay.
Still, after birth, she noticed her son wasn’t doing well. He was underweight, and she was having trouble breastfeeding. Major medical organizations recommend breast milk as a primary source of nutrients for the first six months of life for newborns and then as a secondary or complementary source of nutrients for up to two years following birth.
Wallace, who’s taught within the local school system for almost a decade, did everything she could to resolve her troubles. She went to lactation consultation sessions, and to therapy. She tried various devices that were meant to help stimulate milk.
“I dieted, I exercised, I drank the Starbucks Pink Drink,” she said in a video testimony played for the Orange County School Board’s public hearing Wednesday. “You name it, I did everything I could to get that milk in.”
Eventually, something worked. She was able to start feeding her son. But she knew she couldn’t stay at home forever taking care of him. Accepting that, however, was hard.
“I didn’t want to return to school,” she admitted. “I was terrified he’d starve without me, but I had to.”
When she returned, she did so to less-than-ideal circumstances for a newly nursing mother, despite support from colleagues and communicating her needs to her school administration. Breastfeeding mothers need to be able to pump roughly every three hours throughout the day, and under federal law, teachers like Wallace are guaranteed this right — namely, the right to reasonable break times and a private place to pump for up to one year.
In practice, however, this proved difficult. Wallace tried to be accommodating. She changed her normal pumping schedule, in order to pump during her second-period planning time and during her lunch break. “I didn’t want to be a bother,” Wallace said.
Without any better alternative, she used her classroom as her “private” space to pump, which proved itself to be an imperfect solution at best. She put up a sign on the outside of her door that read, “Pumping, please do not enter.” She locked her door.
But it didn’t work. Within a one-month period, Wallace recalled being walked in on five times by custodians, vendors and other staff. She would hear the jingle of a master key and immediately feel a sense of dread, as she realized her private pumping space was about to be far from private after all.
“That was humiliating, and it’s unacceptable, and it’s entirely preventable,” Wallace argued.
She went to her school administration, which allegedly reprimanded her for putting up an “obscene” sign. She was told to stop using her own makeshift sign and put up a “Do Not Enter” sign instead, which also didn’t work.
During the school testing season, it was worse.
Because of the different schedule, she needed a replacement to come in to help relieve her for a short time so she could go pump somewhere every few hours, but struggled to get the help she needed.
“Day one of testing, no one came,” Wallace recalled. “No one answered my calls or emails. [I] cried in my room. My son went hungry that day.”
In the days after, staff who came to relieve her would arrive late, with excuses, or treat her as though she were a burden. “I felt like a social pariah at my own school, just because I was trying to pump so my son would have milk. And that’s unacceptable,” she recalled.
Due to her difficulties getting coverage at work, she developed mastitis, an infection that is most common in breastfeeding mothers. As a result of that infection she lost her milk, and had no other option than to feed her newborn formula.
In her testimony, Wallace — who said she’s now working at a different school, where she feels supported — said she made the decision to speak out because she doesn’t want to see the same thing happen to someone else. “I don’t want other women to have to go through what I went through.”
“I beg of you help me protect the next woman so she doesn’t have to go home to a hungry son,” she continued, speaking directly to members of the all-female Orange County School Board, who govern the fourth-largest school district in the state and the eighth-largest in the country.
Wallace’s union, the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association — representing nearly 14,000 educators, school psychologists and other staff in the county school system — fought the district to enshrine pumping rights at work in the union’s next contract. The district initially shot down the union’s proposal, arguing that because that right is already guaranteed under federal law, the proposal was “a solution looking for problems.”
But the eight-member Orange County School Board overrode the district’s position and largely approved the union’s requested contract language on pumping rights, which now heads to union membership for a vote.
The Orange County CTA, which bargains new union contracts for teachers each year, reached an impasse with the school district in mid-September, forcing the two parties to appeal to the eight-member school board for resolution.
Despite reaching agreements on certain things, like guaranteeing three days of district-paid bereavement leave, the two parties were unable to agree on several issues — ranging from pumping rights to wage increases and a paid parental leave proposal from the union that the district dismissed, citing a lack of funds.
While wages, and a general sense of respect from the school district, were the headline issues during the impasse meeting, the issue of accommodations for breastfeeding educators was one of the union’s most personal and most passionate appeals, even though it’s something teachers are supposed to be guaranteed already.
Under the federal PUMP Act, approved by U.S. Congress in 2022, more than 9 million workers are guaranteed pumping rights in the workplace that they were previously excluded from. The problem, according to the union, is that they’ve heard complaints of noncompliance from teachers.
“Do you want us to sue or go and file an administrative charge under the law when teachers are walked in on, when principals don’t really fully understand that you must have, under the law, a private place to pump?” asked Mark Richard, a labor-side attorney on behalf of Orange County CTA.
“We’re asking to take the federal law and put part of it into our contract, because we would rather go through the quickness of a grievance system, where you talk to each other, than to, say, go to federal court or a federal agency,” he explained to the school board. “That’s been rejected.”
An outside attorney, speaking on behalf of Orange County’s superintendent Wednesday, didn’t deny their rejection of the proposed contract language. “These are solutions looking for issues,” argued Jeffrey Mandel, chief negotiator for the district and a managing partner of the Orlando office of Fisher & Phillips. The firm is one of the nation’s largest law firms specializing in employer-side labor relations as well as union avoidance. (One of their strategies, though it doesn’t seem to have been applied here, is “treating employees with dignity and respect” — in other words, limiting perceptions of unfair treatment before employees get so fed up they demand a union.)
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Going above and beyond federal law, the union also asked the district to provide a locked refrigerator for nursing educators, to prevent teachers’ breast milk from being tampered with or potentially spoiled. Mandel, however, called the proposal “impractical,” and the school board ultimately shot that part of the proposal down, too.
“We haven’t been presented with the information that there is a problem here, and there are low-cost alternatives that exist right now,” said Mandel, referring to existing refrigerators educators have access to already. Richard, however, argued that implementation of their proposal would be “almost free.” It also, as the district has pointed out, simply affirms the rights that educators are already entitled to under federal law.
Putting it into a contract, however, means educators don’t have to go through the process of complaining to a federal agency over noncompliance. By the time federal officials even get their case, it’s possible that they could be too late.
Orange County teachers aren’t alone in this struggle. While the PUMP Act was intended to empower teachers, registered nurses, farm workers and others with rights they were previously excluded from, Education Week reports that this hasn’t exactly panned out in practice, at least not yet.
Problems such as staff shortages, or lack of a private space to pump, have served as barriers to implementation, experts told Education Week, but educators may also be afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation. Under federal law, workers are guaranteed “reasonable” breaks for pumping in a private space for one year after a child’s birth. A private space is described under law as “[a] place other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-workers and the public.”
Think about it this way: You wouldn’t want someone preparing your food in a bathroom; babies probably don’t either. Or as the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health puts it, “No one would be willing to prepare food in a bathroom, and that includes breastmilk.”
“Bathrooms are not a sanitary place to prepare and handle food of any kind,” the agency notes.
Pumping rights aren’t just important for mothers, but for babies, too. According to the Office on Women’s Health, breastfed babies are healthier and more likely to get the nutrients they need compared to formula. Breastfeeding can also be protective against sudden infant death syndrome, as well as asthma, ear infections, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and stomach bugs among babies.
The Orange County school district, like most other Florida counties, doesn’t offer paid maternity leave for educators who give birth, foster, or adopt a child. Under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, they have access to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. But for teachers who are already struggling to afford Orange County’s cost of living, or who are living paycheck to paycheck, that may not be a viable solution.
The teachers’ union, therefore, also called on the district to provide educators with 12 weeks of paid parental leave — a proposal that would have make them the first county in Florida to do so. Currently, only the Brevard County school district offers paid maternity leave (not paternity leave), and that’s just for 30 days.
Angie Gallo, who serves as school board member for District 1, said that she reached out to Brevard County to ask how much their paid leave policy costs them. According to Gallo’s source, the cost is roughly $300,000 annually, which she believed “the district could afford.”
After all, it’s less than the annual salary of Orange County superintendent Dr. Maria Vazquez, who receives $330,000 a year as her base salary.
“For us to do the maternity leave, then maybe we can start out, like, at three weeks or 30 days,” Gallo suggested. “At least it’s something versus nothing, and I think that that is a number that the district could afford.”
Ultimately, however, the full board decided against the paid leave proposal, while urging both parties to go back to the negotiating table to come up with a viable option. The board also sided with the district on their wage proposal, which offers an average 2 percent raise for teachers this year, or up to 2.25 percent for teachers rated “Highly Effective.”
Mandel, speaking on behalf of the district, cited budgetary pressures, saying the district’s proposal would cost an estimated $21 million. The union’s proposal of an average 4.4 percent wage increase, on the other hand, would cost an estimated $46 million, per the district.
Both parties pointed fingers at the limited state funds the district receives from Tallahassee, a portion of which they are also required by law to give to charter schools and school vouchers.
“Bottom line, the district’s budget cannot sustain anything more than what we offered without having to cut staff,” said Mandel.
Several board members who were sympathetic to teachers’ difficulties nonetheless erred on the side of caution, adhering to Mandel’s guidance.
“It’s not fair, I get it,” said Gallo.
Teresa Jacobs, chair of the school board, echoed her colleague’s grim acknowledgement. “It’s nowhere near enough, and yet it’s all we have.”
In a statement, the union said they were disappointed in the board’s decision to side with the district on wages, among other issues, but proud of the progress they made on bereavement, pumping protections, and advanced degree supplements.
“This fight is far from over, and with the strength of our union, we will continue to push for the respect, pay and conditions our educators deserve.”
This post has been updated to clarify that Brevard County schools offer paid maternity leave for staff, not Broward.
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This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.