150 teachers still without paycheck

David Leacock

It’s past mid-October and several teachers are still waiting to be paid for the month of September. Around one hundred and fifty teachers from across the country did not receive their salaries at the end of the past month; that was a major setback because the teachers claim they have commitments to meet. But according to the Ministry of Education, some of the backlog has been cleared with the Teaching Services Commission and C.E.O., David Leacock, says they are hoping to make the remaining payments by the end of the week, but there are teachers whose documents have still not been submitted. Leacock explained that the Ministry can’t be blamed for the delay, but it has to do with a lack of documentation.

David Leacock, C.E.O., Ministry of Education and Youth

“Managing authorities in some instances submitted incomplete documentation to the commission so the commission could do its work. And in other instances, did not submit documentation at all. So the teachers were in the classrooms, we did not know they were in the classrooms, the commission did not know they were in the classrooms and the managements did not make the submissions because I think they realize that they did not have all the documentation required. So we were oblivious to this issue and it wasn’t brought to our attention until the end of the month when some of the teachers started calling and said well we didn’t get paid. We started calling around to the managements and we discovered that some of them had withheld—at least one—had withheld or had not submitted the documentation required because it was incomplete. Apart from that, there were some other little complications. For example, with—sometimes teachers are being transferred, teachers who are in the system already but maybe were being transferred from one school to another—sometimes those teachers ended up, the managing authority would treat them as new teachers. And so they thought they needed to get all this information over again and so there were some complications in that regard and so that added to it. We are working at this time very, very diligently with the commission, with the managing authorities of the schools concerned and with the Ministry of finance treasury department to try to expedite the payment of those teachers. They have been employed, they were in the classrooms. Technically speaking, they haven’t really been approved, but they were in the classrooms and were doing work so we’re trying to expedite to work out an arrangement so that they can be paid for September; giving some kind of temporary status so that they can get paid and hopefully we will allow a period for the paperwork to catch up, if you will.”