Safe Utah Schools is asking the Governor and the State of Utah to provide hazard pay to all school personnel by delegating additional state funds to the school districts for this purpose, as well as overtime pay for teachers who, through quarantine or district design, are teaching two different modalities.

Utah is sacrificing school personnel in the name of the economy, and has refused to provide even basic protections for us. It is time to pay staff for the valuable service they are providing despite the personal risk to us and our families simply by coming in to work. We will need the additional funds as hospital costs from contracting COVID are very high, and support staff often do not have district-provided health insurance. 

The Safe Utah Schools community's previous petition garnered over 10,000 signatures and fell on deaf ears within the Utah government. We were asking for PPE, ventilation, and other safety measures afforded to those working the front lines of a pandemic, and were met with absolute silence.

In mid-August, teachers and staff went back to the jobs they loved taking care of kids and educating them, many of them knowing that the state of Utah had uncontrolled community spread  of COVID-19. 

Now our daily COVID counts are nearly 10 times what they were when we returned to classrooms in August, and the percent positivity has doubled. Teachers are still working full-time in classrooms where there's a high probability that someone in their classroom has COVID-19. Bus drivers are being confined to very small, unventilated busses to transport students, both symptomatic and not, and aides and nutrition staff are exposed to every student in the school multiple times per day. 

Teachers are getting sick at higher rates than the general population (as of November 12, 4.1% of teachers have contracted the disease and 3% of the general population between August 13 and November 12), but Safe Utah Schools has yet to be able to track the percentage of staff being infected, the number of which is considerable.

In addition to the health risks, teachers in all districts were asked to shoulder an extra burden of teaching both online and in-person students. Creating videos and assignments for online students is a second full-time job that teachers are doing on the same salary they have always received. Some districts are providing a small bonus this year, but it doesn't come close to compensating for the extreme number of hours teachers are spending unpaid on their work this year. Teachers are doing the work of, at minimum, 1.5 teachers, but probably closer to 2 teachers, and should be compensated accordingly. Extra time spent working on teaching the second modality should be tracked and paid hourly at the rate of overtime if total hours are above 40 in a given week. Expecting teachers to do two jobs for the price of one is what is costing the state educators who see that they are not valued. (article: Teacher Exodus: Teachers Retiring in Droves Amid Covid-19 Pandemic)