Innswood teachers cry foul
Published:Saturday | March 26, 2022 | 12:06 AMRuddy Mathison/Gleaner Writer
More than 100 teachers and members of the ancillary staff at the Innswood High School in St Catherine took to the streets Thursday to peacefully protest the non-payment of National Housing Trust (NHT) and National Insurance Scheme (NIS) that they claimed were deducted from their salaries.
The protesters, who gathered under a nearby bus stop at the intersection of Old Harbour Road and Hartland Road to ensure that they were not obstructing the flow of traffic, said they have been trying to get refunds from the NHT and NIS for over nine years, but have been met with numerous roadblocks.
“Our action today is a culmination of a number of meetings we have had since last year when we discovered that our NHT and NIS deductions were not paid, this was deducted from our salaries nine years coming up,” said spokesman for the group of protestors and teacher, Eric Brown.
GETTING THE RUNAROUND
“We have been getting the runaround every time we tried to get information from the school on the status of our deductions; the parties who can resolve the problem with the stroke of a pen are not doing so,” he further stated.
Brown argued that the Ministry of Education has a fiduciary responsibility for their deductions and they only discovered that the deductions were unpaid when they applied for their returns.
The action of the protesters, however, generated a quick response from the Ministry of Education which dispatched a team, including Region 6 education officer with direct responsibility for Innswood High School, Marcia Higgins, to the school to have a meeting with the protesting teachers and general staff members.
Higgins declined to comment on the matter.
Vice-principal of the school, Kenya Hanson, told The Gleaner that representatives of the Ministry of Education and the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) met with the affected teachers and staff members and they were fully briefed on the matter, noting that was all he was willing to say.
Brown, in the meantime, told The Gleaner following the meeting that they were assured by representatives from the ministry that payments for 2012, 2013, and 2014 were made to the NHT on Thursday, so the refunds should be available very soon.
“We are not going to be satisfied until we get our refund, but today we got some specific assurances that the NHT deductions were paid over from the Ministry of Education to NHT, so we will work with this until we see the outcome,” he noted.
He continued: “As it relates to the NIS deductions, we were told by the ministry representatives that an investigation will be carried out to ensure that there is no discrepancy with the payments.”
Sources at the school revealed that the protest action did not adversely disrupt the smooth running of classes on Thursday, as other teachers who are not affected were manning classes during the protest.