Employment Law Report
Indiana Employers Take Note: New Unpaid Leave Rights for School-Related Meetings
Written by Isaac K. Keller
Effective July 1, 2025, Indiana’s Senate Bill 409 (SB 409) introduced a new employment protection: employees may take one unpaid, job-protected leave per calendar year to attend specified school-related meetings for their child—without fear of adverse employment action. Indiana joins roughly a dozen other states in providing employees with leave rights for certain school-related meetings. The majority of states, including Kentucky and Tennessee, have not enacted similar protections.
SB 409 covers all employers across Indiana, including state agencies, local governments and any private company that employs at least one employee. Every employee is eligible for leave for specific school-related meetings, regardless of tenure or hours worked, and may take the leave for applicable school-related meetings that concern their biological child, adopted child, foster child, or stepchild.
The new law protects an employee’s right to attend only certain school-related meetings. The meetings include truancy-related school meetings or other attendance conferences, and Case Conference Committee meetings or Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings. An employee is entitled to one meeting per calendar year under SB 409. An employee seeking protection under the law must provide their employer with at least 5 calendar days’ advance notice of the meeting. Additionally, an employer may limit leave to what is reasonably necessary for attendance and travel and may request proof of attendance from the employee or the school.
Until now, parents in Indiana seeking leave to attend school-related meetings for their children had very limited protections under the Family and Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”). For example, FMLA can, in certain cases, be used to cover absences for school meetings—most commonly IEP meetings or other conferences directly tied to a child’s “qualifying serious health condition.”[1] But those protections are narrow: applying only to government employees, or employees of a private employer with 50 or more employees, that have at least 12 months of service and 1,250 hours worked in the prior year.
SB 409 expands the protections afforded to Indiana employees. The new law grants all employees, regardless of employer size or tenure, the right to take one unpaid, job-protected leave per calendar year to attend an attendance conference or an IEP meeting for a child with disabilities. The law expires automatically on July 1, 2029 due to a sunset provision in SB 409 unless extended by the legislature. In the meantime, Indiana employers should update employee handbooks accordingly and ensure that managers and HR professionals are adequately prepared to comply with the new leave requirement.
[1] The U.S. Department of Labor issued an FMLA opinion letter in 2019 that noted that IEP meetings, and similar conferences related to a child’s mental or physical health, were qualifying reasons for taking intermittent FMLA leave.
