RALEIGH (AP) -- If you're a teacher and you want to get a substitute so you can take personal leave, it will cost you, and educators would like to change that decades-long policy.

Teachers are required to pay 50 dollars toward the cost of hiring a substitute. It's a policy that's been on the books since the 1960s, and it covers only part of the 65 to 132 dollars a day it can cost to hire a substitute.

Jennifer Lanane, a veteran teacher and president of the North Carolina Association of Educators' Wake County chapter, says North Carolina is the only state in the Southeast that charges the substitute fee.

The association would like to see the fee vanish, and has included the issue in its 2007-2008 legislative agenda.

Garner High School teacher James Brantley would like to see a change as well. Each October, he takes a day off to be with his wife on her birthday, and that's cost him 500 dollars over the last decade.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)