Vacation, sick leave should be pooled for employees

As a classified staff employee, one can only acquire so many hours of sick leave. A month before the end of our fiscal year I was told by my HR person that I need to use over 40 hours of sick leave or lose it.

If I haven't used my allotted sick leave hours by now it may look a little deceiving to use them all in the month of June. Where I work, we are instructed only to use sick leave when sick and I abide by this policy. I know you can convert a portion of these hours over to vacation (a ratio of 1 to 5 total sick leave hours). I usually donate these converted hours back to those in need.

My suggestion to CU Staff Council is to bring up the issue of leave time to our state Legislature and convert all vacation and sick leave into one – personal time off. The current sick leave policy is unfair to those who do not get sick and lose this time off.

I hate to say this but if the current policy is not corrected in the future, I might have to take several mental sick days to get over this policy. I got a headache just writing this e-mail.

Kris Schoech
Collegiate Sport Clubs
University of Colorado at Boulder

Where's center's lap pool?

What a joke! A Health and Wellness Center with no lap pool (July 28, 2010 Newsletter). What genius thought of that?

We used to have the old Fitzsimons pool on campus, run by the city of Aurora. All it would have taken was $50,000 per year to keep that facility running when Aurora decided to cut costs due to its budget. But the School of Medicine and UC Denver chose not to contribute to keep the lap pool open.

Funny how we can build a multimillion-dollar wellness facility but couldn't work out a deal with the city to keep Fitzsimons lap pool on campus running for a few thousand per year!

Mark Mundt
Psychiatry
University of Colorado Denver

Editor's note: Jim Ellis, director of operations for the center, responds, "A lap pool was given strong consideration. But due to the necessary building footprint and cost implications, it was not included in the final plan."

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