A special committee met earlier this month to address concerns that University of Wisconsin System faculty report less sick days than other state employees.

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents committee discussed a recent audit by the Legislative Audit Bureau that investigated the lack of sick day reporting.

UW-Stevens Point professor Chris Sadler, who serves on the committee, said faculty are not reporting a "significant use of colleague coverage," when a professor has another faculty member cover when he is not able to teach.

According to the current policy, Sadler said, a professor is not required to report a sick day if his class is covered by another faculty member.

"What the committee recommended was ending that part of the sick leave policy so there is still great encouragement for faculty to cover each others' classes when they're sick," Sadler said. "When you're sick, you will report … that you were sick, even if you have a colleague cover your course."

Sadler said he was not sure if the current policy caused a significant problem, citing that each year, faculty contracts cover only the academic year, which would explain why they report fewer sick days.

"I think part of that is that more of us are on nine month contracts, and so if you have to have something done where you need to go to the hospital, you can lots of times schedule that over the summer when you're not working," Sadler said.

The new policy will require faculty to report sick days even when other faculty members cover classes.

"We're simply trying to kind of have an equitable system for all the people who work on a campus so when a nonfaculty member is sick, they take a sick day," Sadler said. "When a faculty member is sick, they take a sick day and what this is going to do is it's going to more accurately reflect the number of sick days."

UW System spokesperson David Giroux said with the new policy clarification, the UW System will "be in a better position to preserve these retirement benefits for all of our employees."

"There were valid concerns raised by people, certainly some of our faculty members have concerns about … their benefits and impact," Giroux said. "What we think we're doing here is a means of preserving a very, very important retirement benefit in a state where our compensation lags behind other states comparing our university campus to other university campuses."

"These kind of fringe benefits are very valuable and they are often things the one thing that makes us competitive in an otherwise slanted field," Giroux added.

The clarification, Giroux said, will ultimately show the UW System is accountable for their policies, while "at the same time [they] preserve that competitive benefit package."

The Board of Regents will vote on the policy change at its December meeting.