• Baylor’s new parental leave and adoption assistance benefits among the best in higher ed

    Adoption Day at Baylor

    If you’re a parent, you understand how important your employer’s support is when you’re having a baby — even more so if you’re adopting. Earlier this spring, Baylor added some new employee benefits to help in both situations.

    Baylor’s new parental leave policy, signed into effect in late March by President David Garland, provides up to four weeks of paid leave for full-time staff (both women and men) who become parents through birth or adoption. That’s a big deal; only one other Texas university (SMU) currently provides paid parental leave for both faculty and staff.

    The adoption assistance program will reimburse full-time Baylor faculty and staff up to $6,000 of qualifying adoption-related expenses per adoption, up to two children per year. This benefit is even more unusual; no other university in Texas offers such a benefit. In fact, Baylor is among only a handful of universities nationwide — schools such as Stanford, Ohio State, NYU and Vanderbilt — to provide such adoption-friendly benefits.

    “This isn’t a cost. This is an investment,” Cheryl Gochis, BA ’91, MA ’94, Baylor vice president for human resources, told the Waco Tribune-Herald. “We’re investing in the lives of our employees. We’re investing in people to say, ‘We love you, we care about you and we love your family and we want you to take care of what you need because we think you’ll be a better employee.’ And, it’s the right thing to do.”

    Sic ’em, Baylor parents!

    You might also like:
    * Children join their forever families at Baylor Law School’s Adoption Day (Nov. 2016)
    * Baylor ties the key to reuniting this long-separated family (Oct. 2015)
    * Baylor makes ‘Great Colleges To Work For’ elite honor roll for 5th straight year (July 2015)
    * Baylor senior finds her true family inside the Baylor family (May 2015)