March 10, 2016 11:02 AM UTC

GOP-Controlled Colorado Senate Kills Parental Leave (Again)

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Business Journal’s Ed Sealover reports on the death of a bill to reauthorize Colorado’s parental leave law for academic activities yesterday in the Senate State Affairs “kill” committee:

Parental leave will remain a topic that must be negotiated between a Colorado business and its employees after a state Senate committee killed a bill Wednesday that would have re-launched former state rules on the subject.

Republicans in the Senate last year killed a measure that would have continued mandates on the minimum amount of hours that companies must allow workers to take unpaid leave in order to attend their children’s academic activities. Democrats in the Legislature brought the bill back this year and were able to get business groups like the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry to remain neutral on it by proposing the same set of requirements that were in place from 2009-15…

A statement from Colorado 9to5 voices that group’s displeasure over the outcome:

This legislation would have reinstated a law that was in effect for five years. That law was passed in 2009 before it “sunset” on September 1, 2015, when Colorado parents lost the job protections that allowed them to attend essential meetings such as Individualized Education Meetings for students with special needs.

“While the Individualized Education Plan process and document are intended to be the efforts of a team, there is no single more important member of this team than the child’s parent,” said Tommie Shimrock, a Denver Public Schools special education teacher. “Parents know their children best: how to redirect their child in effective ways; why their child feels the ways that they do; and how to bring out the best in their child so they can be as successful as possible.”

The killing of House Bill 16-1002 yesterday afternoon didn’t receive much press coverage, but could nonetheless loom large in the upcoming election season. Parental leave for academic activities was the law in Colorado for years, in which time there was simply no evidence of any adverse effect on Colorado’s economy. The bill reauthorizing the law prior to sunset last September did expand some categories of activities that would be covered; after that attempt died last year, this year’s bill was a “clean” reauthorization of the parental leave statute with no expansion.

What this means, in short, is that Republicans took parental leave for academic needs away from Colorado families. That’s a different proposition politically from killing a new proposal for parental leave, and can be characterized very negatively. Particularly in the case of vulnerable House members who voted no on this bill–like Rep. Kevin Priola, now running for the Senate–a potent line of attack has been opened against them.

Correction: they opened this line of attack against themselves.