Paid leave reaches the local level, as Kentucky school board responds to Delta variant. | WSILTV.COM

Baby boom associated with pro-family policies during the pandemic suggests longer-term positive impact of such policies upon fertility rates. | INSTITUTE FOR FAMILY STUDIES

A mother's personal story underscoring the need for paid family leave. | AMERICAN COMPASS

Paid family leave could help bring desired rates of childbearing to fruition. | AMERICAN COMPASS

Former NFL player turned public official sets precedent for paternity leave. | PEOPLE

Calls for paid leave are increasingly sounding at the state and local levels. | WTRF

We need a national paid family and medical leave program. Here's what Congress can do. | NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER

State-level Republican support for paid leave grows as Republican federal legislators present more policy options. | HERALD DISPATCH

Businesses call on Congress to pass paid family leave in a bipartisan fashion. | THE HILL

Paid family leave promotes children's welfare and parental bonding, including bonds between adopting parents and their adoptive children. | TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT

Extending paid leave would help members of the military balance starting or growing their families with their responsibilities to protect the nation, service members say. Lily Sasser’s baby arrived three months early, but her husband had to return to work at Fort Bragg a week later. | CAROLINA PUBLIC PRESS

Republicans in Congress should support bipartisan proposals to make paid leave for families a reality, such as the one offered by Senators Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), writes Jon Schweppe. Their plan “would cost the taxpayer virtually nothing while being extremely beneficial to families, providing them with access to cash at a time when they need it the most,” he argues. | TOWNHALL

Paid maternity leave can improve the well-being of mothers, especially among Black Americans by reducing the maternal mortality rate in the US, writes Joia Crear-Perry. As of now in the US, the six weeks following labor are when 40% of maternal deaths happen, and 23% of new mothers return to their workplace only 10 days after giving birth. | BLOOMBERG

The US should adopt a federal paid leave policy in order to help small businesses succeed, says a spokesperson with Paid Leave for the U.S. Meanwhile, the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) is urging its members to avoid advocating for “tax hikes and new mandates.” | THE HILL

Republicans should lead the effort to make paid leave a reality, following through on one of President Trump’s priorities, writes Jean Evans, a former state representative in Missouri. It’s a bipartisan issue and “critical to our efforts to promote stronger families, to improve morale in our workforce, and to keep Missourians self-sufficient,” she argues. | THE MISSOURI TIMES

The rise in the number of people who experience symptoms from COVID-19 over the long haul highlights the need for access to paid leave, advocates say. “I feel like we’ve been kind of left and forgotten about, and because there’s a lot of us long-haulers that are grocery store workers, that are working in hospitals and taking care of all the people that were brought down by this pandemic,” says Roisin Monroe, an insurance company employee who had to quit her job seven months after contracting COVID-19 due to ongoing symptoms. | THE HILL

In order for the nation to fully recover from COVID-19, Americans should have access to paid sick leave, writes Robert Apodaca. After he contracted the virus, his recovery lasted 123 days before he was able to “walk a mile again without feeling out of breath,” he says. | SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN

Black Americans are more likely than others to be part of the workforce demographic without access to paid leave, a new report by Prudential reveals. Additionally, Prudential found that 69% of Americans would not be able to financially cover an unexpected emergency even before COVID-19 because they are living paycheck to paycheck. | MARKETSCREENER

Senator Rubio is among the leaders on the right who have advocated and gained more support for paid leave, writes Holly Raschien in the Miami Herald. Congress should follow through on those efforts in 2018 by passing some kind of federal paid leave with bipartisan support, she argues. | MIAMI HERALD

Vast numbers of the American workforce are unlikely to take time off at the birth of a child out of fear they will lose their job a new study reveals, highlighting how the adoption of such a policy could strengthen families in the US. Statistics pulled from a sample of 8,500 workers at the top 85 companies in the country show that 28% of women, 38% of men, 49% of Black workers, and 53% of Hispanic workers share this fear of losing employment even though they are working jobs paying a median wage of only $12.75 per hour. | YAHOO NEWS