Corozal Community College Cancels Classes Over Teacher Pay Dispute

Corozal Community College has cancelled classes today owing to a number of teachers being absent or called in sick. At issue is an alleged disagreement between the college board and the administration and over 50 teachers and staff are caught in the middle…instead of receiving their salary on the 28^th of the month as is the norm, the teachers were sent an email on Friday from the Finance Officer, Darrell Thompson with a long list of excuses why they will not be paid ranging from “their increments and commuting allowances were submitted late but that they are in process and pending approval from the Ministry of Education, we also manage the cafeteria and security payroll, the power outage that severely affected process of the payroll to the downtime being compounded by the delay in restoring the server.”

The teachers have taken their plight to the Belize National Teacher’s Union. LOVE News spoke to its President, Nadia Caliz who says the union is not having it.  

Nadia Caliz, BNTU President:“Teachers should not fall victim to a grievance between leadership. We’re talking two levels. We’re talking board, we’re talking admin. And so the fact that our teachers are standing up against this, the union must support this kind of action that they’re taking. I’m sorry, some might not agree with me. But when you need to pay your bills, nobody wants to hear that there is a dispute with your management. If you don’t meet that deadline, you suffer. You have to pay the interest. So this is, this is ludicrous. They should never ever, ever have this kind of nonsense going on in this country. I know MOU is also involved , but it should have been settled. By the time they became aware of the grievance, it should have been settled. Now teachers have to stand out and send a message that this will not be tolerated. And to be quite honest, every September there is some kind of issue with this college.”

Caliz says that it’s not first time a matter like this is plaguing the teachers. 

Nadia Caliz, BNTU President:“The internal situation has led to the persons in charge of finance not carrying out their responsibility. So they are registering their discontent by not preparing the payroll But we are with our members in Corozal. We are standing with them. And we also have our lawyer on standby as well.”

Caliz says that the union has given CCC a deadline of today to work out their issue and pay the teachers. Our investigation confirmed that the issues at CCC are nothing new. Reports are that the situation is messy because the Corozal Junior College and the Corozal Community College share one board of directors which has not been functioning well because the dean of the junior college is on administrative leave for almost eight months while CJC was conducting an investigation into misappropriation of funds. Reports are that nothing has been found yet instead of reinstating the dean an interim dean in the person of Jason Chen and interim assistant dean, Yvette Riverol have been appointed. These two people are now tasked to investigate both the principal and vice principal of CCC and the teachers are up in arms over the witch hunt