Kelly Browning was eight months pregnant when she got her dream job teaching high-schoolers in Friendswood, Texas, a suburb of Houston. But it didn’t come with any parental leave, so she took six weeks off, mostly unpaid.
After the birth of her second child, she took a year of unpaid leave. And she burned through 20 sick days in 2022 when she and her husband cared for a foster baby they would later adopt.
In search of a career with better leave options, Browning left teaching in 2023.
“I was naive,” she said of getting into the profession. If given more generous parental leave benefits, “teachers would stay and retire again, like they used to. Teachers would stop leaving.”
Fifteen percent of teachers who leave the female-dominated profession cite personal reasons such as pregnancy and childbirth for doing so, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank. These losses come at a time when many school districts are desperate to keep educators amid persistent shortages, and when the private sector has been expanding paid family leave benefits.
An estimated 7 percent of teachers retired or resigned during the 2023-2024 school year — lower than previous years but higher than before the coronavirus pandemic, according to a 2025 report from Rand.
Republicans and Democrats are working to change that, pushing for more paid leave policies.
Arkansas’ 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, a policy that took effect at the beginning of this school year, will “keep teachers in the classroom longer and, in some cases, keep them from leaving the profession altogether,” Arkansas state Rep. Andrew Collins (D) told local media.
Some state lawmakers are looking at paid leave policies as a tool not only for retaining current school or government employees but also for attracting new ones. While the share of private-sector employees with access to paid family leave jumped from 13 percent to 27 percent between 2017 and 2023, the proportion of teachers with that benefit grew by a single percentage point, to 28 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We’re in competition for workers,” said Alabama state Rep. Ginny Shaver (R). Last year, her state approved eight weeks of paid parental leave for women working in the public sector and two weeks for men.
“We’re trying to make it more attractive, to encourage people to go into the teaching profession, which is hard to do when they can make more money in the private sector,” Shaver said.
Thirty-five states — more than two-thirds of the country — do not offer guaranteed paid time off for teachers beyond sick days, data from the National Council on Teacher Quality shows. Fifteen states and D.C. require schools to offer some kind of leave, such as six weeks of fully paid leave in Georgia or 12 weeks of partial pay in Maryland.
Arkansas and Delaware are the only states where teachers receive full pay for 12 weeks, the amount of time several health organizationsrecommend parents spend with their new babies.
“We’re surprised that so few states are offering this benefit that is so critically important to teachers, and also ultimately to their students, given the need to attract and retain effective teachers in classrooms today,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Parental leave is also getting support from conservatives who want Americans to have more children. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, outlined in a January report the importance of policies such as parental leave for promoting marriage and childbearing.
“When it comes to those early stages of life for a child, it’s imperative that they have a connection to both their parents,” said Delano Squires, director of Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing. “We’re in support of the family and things that make it easy to form and sustain families.”
After Mississippi lawmakers advanced policy last year to give public employees paid leave, state House Speaker Jason White (R) said the measure reflected Mississippi’s “pro-life” position. Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor of Iowa, declared that state “pro-family” when she signed legislation in May that gave public employees four weeks of paid maternity leave and one week of paid paternity leave.
In the absence of parental leave, teachers say they’ve had to get creative. They hoard their own sick days or seek donated days from colleagues. They try to plan their pregnancies to give birth over the summer, leaving time to recover. “Imagine the pressure that women have,” said Lori Sebastian, a former teacher who now provides coaching to other educators in Delaware.
Delaware passed a law in 2018 that guaranteed public employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave, which has helped keep more educators in the classroom, according to the state’s teachers union. A 2024 report found that 93 percent of state employees said the benefit made them more willing to return to work.
“I’m seeing women have more additions to their family,” said Sebastian, who works at an elementary school in Middletown, Delaware.
When Sebastian had her first daughter in 2016, she had stockpiled 40 sick days — four years’ worth — to put toward maternity leave. She remembers being worried about using all her paid time off at once. What would happen if she or her baby got sick later?
She had another baby in 2019, after Delaware’s parental leave law took effect. “My mental status was totally different,” she said. “I stayed home for 12 weeks, and all my sick time I had banked didn’t change. I didn’t have to use any of that time, which was amazing.”
In Texas, a state that doesn’t require school districts to pay teachers who take parental leave, second-grade teacher Tori Motter took 60 unpaid days off from school to care for her third child, who was born in October.
She said she will miss out on $14,000 in wages.
Parents for Public Education, a nonprofit co-founded by Browning that raises money to support teachers who take unpaid leave, raised $2,000 for Motter. The grant ended up being the “decision-maker” for her and her husband to have their daughter.
“I’m just so thankful,” said Motter, adding that she plans to use the grant for groceries. “It’s crazy that a job that has so many women who love children won’t support them in having their own.”
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