Additional Paid Leave Over Winter Break
Colleagues,
Over the past 20 months, KU faculty and staff have taken on unprecedented challenges to help thousands of KU students continue their education and graduate. We recognize this work has been both fulfilling and exhausting at times, and we appreciate your effort and sacrifice in support of our students and the university.
In appreciation of your extraordinary efforts and to provide you time to focus on your wellbeing and reset for the spring semester, we will close the Lawrence and Edwards campuses Dec. 26 through Jan. 1 and offer paid leave to employees on these campuses. You will not be required to use accrued leave during this time.
Units that provide essential services for managing campus safety and systems may not be able to have all employees take leave at the same time. These units may allow a small number of employees to use Dec. 19 through Dec. 25 as an alternative paid week.
Human Resource Management will provide details regarding time reporting for regular hourly employees. Salaried employees will not have to take any action in HR/Pay for this paid leave. We also want to reinforce that this additional paid leave does not preclude or replace your ability to take additional vacation or other accrued time off with your supervisor’s approval.
We are still in a pandemic, and managing the stress and uncertainty of this environment remains challenging. We hope the paid leave provides you additional time to relax, re-energize and focus on your mental and physical health. Because this paid leave is in response to the pandemic, it is not a long-term change to our paid leave program. As the pandemic subsides over the coming year, we don’t expect to provide additional paid leave over winter break in 2022.
Again, thank you for all your efforts this year to support our students, your colleagues and the KU community during these difficult times.
Respectfully,
Doug and Barb
Douglas A. Girod
Chancellor
Barbara A. Bichelmeyer
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor