School district can run disability leave with assault leave, court rules

That is where the dispute began. WISD policy required the teacher’s temporary disability leave – a separate leave the state requires for educators whose condition stops them from working – to run at the same time as her assault leave, rather than back to back. The teacher argued the leaves should stack, giving her more total protected time.

She grieved the policy inside the district, lost at every level, and the school board voted against her. She then appealed to the education commissioner, who ruled for the district. A Travis County district court agreed. So did the appeals court.

The case turned on a single line in the assault-leave statute. The law says assault leave comes “in addition to” other days of leave “provided by this section or by the school district.” The teacher leaned on the word “all,” arguing it left no room for exceptions. The court read the sentence differently. The phrase that mattered, the judges said, was leave “provided . . . by the school district” – which covers leave the district itself creates, not leave the state separately requires, like temporary disability leave.

Because lawmakers spelled out statutory leave elsewhere in the same section, the court reasoned, they “knew how to specify statutory leave” when they wanted to. They did not do so here. So the district could run the two leaves concurrently.

The court did not decide the family-leave question. It called that issue moot because the teacher had not worked the 1,250 hours in the prior year that federal law requires for eligibility.