True, you're right. More precisely, there is the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act (FEPLA) which makes paid parental leave available (and replaces FMLA where applicable).
Predoc interns and postdocs are not technically considered full federal employees and instead belong in a hybrid category that allows you to get some benefits like leave and health but not others (e.g., FERS retirement contribution).
Thanks - your hunch is exactly what I assume to be the case. My TD doesn't know definitively either way, and getting info from HR can be a pain - but that's the route I'll have to go. Thanks again!
Great idea, sent them an email. Thanks so much!
What I learned was that the funding paying the trainees coming from a different budget not from the local VA. It makes things less straightforward. A peer during my training year had to take some leave time to take care of a close family member. She worked it out with a supervisor who agreed to sign off her hours for her to work on Saturdays to make up the days that she had taken off. She also negotiated to shorten her lunch break to 15 minutes to reduce the number of days she had to work a full shift on Saturdays.
I had a similar situation during postdoc, although not at a VA. My wife had significant complications after the birth of our 1st, extending my planned 2-week leave into ~6 weeks. The TD was wonderful and assured me they'd work with me to fulfil my licensure requirements. Even more wonderful were my colleagues (and HR), who, after all paid vacation and sick time ran out, donated their time to me so that I could continue receiving a paycheck. Even though I knew I didn't want a fulltime clinical career, they made it hard to leave.
Wow, that's really awesome. It seems my TD will be supportive of me taking leave, the question is how much I have coming to me. If I use my accumulated paid leave, I'd probably take 1.5-2 weeks or so. If I would have been entitled to paid leave, that would be a different story...
