CU Boulder leadership has approved a new interim Paid Parental Leave Policy that updates eligibility criteria to make the benefit available to more employee groups upon their start date at the university.
Under the previous policy, regular tenured/tenure-track nine-month faculty members were eligible for the benefit upon their start date, while the other groups did not become eligible until they’d worked for the university for 12 consecutive months.
“While we will be reviewing the parental policy as a whole in the near future, we enacted this interim policy now so that we could create greater parity between our faculty and staff employees,” Chief Operating Officer Patrick O’Rourke said. “We will continue to look for ways to enhance wellness and equity across our community.”
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Effective Oct. 1, 2022, the following employee groups (for employees whose appointments are 50% or greater) are now also eligible for the benefit upon their start date.
- University staff (regular 12-month faculty member/university staff)
- Classified staff
- Twelve-month non-tenured/tenure-track faculty (research professors, research associates, PRAs and post-doctoral associates)
- Other nine-month faculty (instructors, senior instructors, principal instructors/teaching professors, scholars in residence, artists in residence and clinical faculty)
- (Separate from this campus policy update, the CU Boulder Graduate School has updated its own Paid Parental Leave Policy to align with the eligibility date change for graduate students on appointment.)
Additionally, the interim policy will be retroactive to include employees experiencing a birth, adoption or foster care placement that occurred between Jan. 1, 2022, and Sept. 30, 2022, and who were not previously eligible for the benefit.
Employees have 12 months from the birth, adoption or foster care placement to use the paid parental leave benefit.
“I’m pleased we’re able to make these changes now and want to thank our shared governance groups for their advocacy in helping to improve this policy,” Provost Russell Moore said.
The updated version of the policy will go through a formal review process in the coming months to permanently codify these changes and potentially update other portions of the policy.
