Program helps ease financial burden during illness
One night last summer Lois “Jeannie” Carter, of the UI Extension office in Macon County, started feeling chest pains. She already had an appointment with her doctor scheduled for the next day, so she waited and reported the pain when she met with the doctor.
After a brief exam, the doctor insisted she go straight to the hospital. She was admitted immediately. Three days later she underwent quadruple bypass heart surgery, and she was out of work for many weeks while she recovered.
Carter said she quickly exhausted her vacation and sick leave, and had it not been for a university program to provide supplemental benefits to campus employees, she likely would have lost her home and her life savings.
Carter is one of thousands of Civil Service and academic professional employees of the university who have donated at least one day of sick or vacation leave to a campuswide pool called the Shared Benefits program. The program allows employees who have contributed to the pool to receive up to 45 days of pay a year when they face a health issue that requires a long absence from work.
“If you had warning you were going to get sick you would prepare for being out of work without pay, but that’s not how life works,” Carter said. “I don’t know what I would have done without this program.”
Although Don Gerard, the facilities manager for molecular and cellular biology, and for integrative biology, has never needed to tap into the program, he agrees it is an important option for campus employees.
“When I first started working at the university about 10 years ago, I was a shipping and receiving clerk on a loading dock and I found that I burned up a lot of my time with my children who were very young at the time,” Gerard said. “They would be sick, or I would be sick, and I realized quickly that I would be in a precarious predicament if I ever needed time beyond what I had accrued.”
As Gerard’s children outgrew childhood illnesses, he remembered what it felt like to worry about running short of sick leave, so he decided to contribute some of his own time to the program.
Marilyn de Jong, records manager for Staff Human Resources, said employees who have accrued at least 11 sick, vacation days, or both, may donate to the pool. The donation provides “membership” in the pool for as long as the employee remains at Illinois.
Carter remembers a year when the pool was running low, and the university began a push to recruit new donors. “I had joined years earlier – as soon as I was eligible – but when I heard they needed more time, I gave another day, because I knew how important the program is. We all need to help each other, and if everybody gives a little bit nobody has to give a lot.”
When a person is dealing with a health crisis that exhausts paid sick leave and vacation benefits, the employee faces the possibility of being removed from the university payroll, said Deb Stone, the director of Academic Human Resources. Shared Benefits often fills the gap between the end of university benefits and the start of SURS or government-sponsored disability benefits, she said.
Although Shared Benefits can only be used when a university employee is ill, the support it provides offers financial security for the employee’s entire family. “Shared Benefits keeps the employee in pay status with full health benefits, so it’s a very family-friendly program, and it removes one major worry people face when they have a long-term illness,” Stone said.
Carter said she will always be grateful to everyone on campus who contributes to the Shared Benefits program. “I’ve worked at places that don’t have anything like this, and I’ve seen what happens when people get really sick. I think this is a wonderful program, and even if I never needed it myself I’m glad I contributed to it. I’m proud to be at a university where people take care of each other.”
More information, including how to contribute, is available online.
