In September 2019, the news appeared that the Community of Madrid applied the sanction to the teacher who won in the courts to get paid for the summer months. Her center suspended her from employment and salary for seven days even though justice had not yet resolved on this sanction.
It was Mely, a woman who had been working in public education for thirty years, in recent years as a French teacher at the Official School of Languages of Tres Cantos. In 2015, Mely took the Community of Madrid to court to claim the payment of the summer months despite being hired as an interim worker. It was the first sentence that recognized that right to a teacher with this type of contract and later it was more courts and teachers who joined this historical claim of the teaching staff.
However, the conflict that has led her to be sanctioned occurred one year after that judicial victory. Mely had a clash with the direction of this language school that has led her now to be suspended from employment and salary for seven days. That year , this teacher had a contract until June 30 and refused, due to the expiration date of her employment relationship with the language school, to leave the September recovery exams ready. According to this teacher, the same order had already been received previously in two other language schools that did accept that it was not her task since the contract did not cover the summer months. For this reason, Mely filed an appeal against the order she had received and never complied with. There began her administrative and judicial journey. In her successive appeals against this order, justice never proved her right. Both administratively and judicially, Mely failed to recognize that it was an order contrary to law.
However, her surprise came when a year and a half after opposing that sanction of the direction of the center, she was informed of the opening of disciplinary proceedings. According to Mely it was at the end of 2017. That file proposed the sanction that has been applied now, seven days of suspension of employment and salary. Mely also appealed and has reached the contentious-administrative path that is the one that is open right now. The next month of February has an appointment in court for the oral hearing of this lawsuit. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education has not waited for what the judges decide to apply the punishment.
The education counseling assures that the sanction can legally be applied because this teacher did not request that she be suspended in a precautionary manner in her lawsuit against them. Mely says she did not include it on the recommendation of her lawyer and regrets the moment chosen by her language school, just at the beginning of the course and a few months before the trial.