Derek Achong

A spe­cial needs teacher who was de­mot­ed over al­leged qual­i­fi­ca­tion is­sues has been grant­ed leave to pur­sue a law­suit con­cern­ing the dis­clo­sure of in­for­ma­tion need­ed for her em­ploy­ment dis­pute.

High Court Judge Frank Seep­er­sad yes­ter­day grant­ed Lily Pe­gus per­mis­sion to pro­ceed with her le­gal ac­tion against the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (TSC).

Ac­cord­ing to court doc­u­ments, Pe­gus en­rolled in a Bach­e­lor of Ed­u­ca­tion pro­gramme spe­cial­is­ing in Spe­cial Needs Ed­u­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) in Sep­tem­ber 2012.

Her at­tor­neys, Ganesh Sa­roop and An­ju Ramkissoon, said Pe­gus chose this field of study be­cause of her strong be­lief in equal­i­ty and her de­sire to help stu­dents who may not have been for­mal­ly di­ag­nosed with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties.

Af­ter com­plet­ing her de­gree in Ju­ly 2016, Pe­gus sub­mit­ted her tran­scripts to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion in pur­suit of em­ploy­ment.

In Au­gust 2018, she was in­ter­viewed by the TSC and was ap­point­ed near­ly two years lat­er as a tem­po­rary teacher, as­signed to the La­dy Ho­choy School in Pe­nal.

How­ev­er, Pe­gus vis­it­ed the min­istry af­ter re­ceiv­ing a first salary that was low­er than what had been stat­ed in her ap­point­ment let­ter.

She was then served with a let­ter in­di­cat­ing that she had, in fact, been ap­point­ed to the post of as­sis­tant teacher.

In Sep­tem­ber last year, the min­istry in­formed Pe­gus that she did not pos­sess the qual­i­fi­ca­tions re­quired to be ap­point­ed as a teacher and ad­vised her of ad­di­tion­al cours­es she would need to com­plete to qual­i­fy for the po­si­tion.

Her lawyers ar­gued that Pe­gus be­came con­cerned as sev­er­al of her class­mates from UTT’s pro­gramme had not faced the same dif­fi­cul­ties in se­cur­ing teacher ap­point­ments.

As a re­sult, they filed a Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act (FOIA) re­quest seek­ing dis­clo­sure of the TSC’s pol­i­cy on teacher ap­point­ments, as well as a list of teach­ers with sim­i­lar qual­i­fi­ca­tions who are cur­rent­ly serv­ing as teach­ers.

The re­quest was lat­er re­vised to seek in­for­ma­tion on­ly on teach­ers ap­point­ed be­tween 2020 and 2022, af­ter the com­mis­sion claimed that pro­vid­ing broad­er da­ta would sig­nif­i­cant­ly strain its re­sources.

Pe­gus filed the law­suit af­ter the com­mis­sion ac­knowl­edged re­ceipt of the amend­ed re­quest but failed to is­sue a de­ci­sion.

Through her le­gal ac­tion, Pe­gus is seek­ing de­c­la­ra­tions that the com­mis­sion breached its statu­to­ry du­ty by fail­ing to ad­dress her dis­clo­sure re­quest with­in a rea­son­able time.

She is al­so ask­ing the court for an or­der com­pelling the com­mis­sion to make a de­ci­sion with­in sev­en days, or al­ter­na­tive­ly, a de­c­la­ra­tion that she is en­ti­tled to the re­quest­ed in­for­ma­tion.

The mat­ter is sched­uled for hear­ing on Sep­tem­ber 22.