KOTA KINABALU – An English teacher and the headmaster of a school in Kota Belud are facing a second legal suit for failing to perform their jobs as educators.
Three more former students have filed a public-interest litigation case against them and three other defendants at the high court here after the teacher allegedly failed to turn up for class for months in 2017.
The teacher and headmaster had been sued for the same reason by another student about two years ago.
In the new case, the three women plaintiffs, all now 19, assert in their claims that, while they repeatedly notified the first defendant, he refused to return to their class to teach.
Further, they claim that the other defendants failed to take any steps to rectify their teacher’s months-long absences, and are thus also in breach of their statutory duties as stated in the federal constitution, the Education Act 1966 and the Public Officers (Conduct and Discipline) Regulations of 1993.
They also cited the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The three plaintiffs – former students Calvina Angayung, Rusiah Sabhdarin and Nur Natasha Allisya Hamali – are suing the teacher and the principal of SMK Taun Gusi, Kota Belud, who are federal government employees.
The other three defendants are the education department director-general, federal minister of education and the federal government – as employers of the first two defendants.
The three plaintiffs were 16-year-olds at the time of the events in 2017. Their district of Kota Belud is one of the poorest in Malaysia: more than one in three live in absolute poverty while the district has recorded the seventh-highest inequality rate in the nation.
“The reason we are doing this is to ensure that other students will not, in future, face the same problems we had all faced at the school,” the plaintiffs told a press conference in Penampang on Tuesday.
Their legal team – Messrs Roxana & Co – is the same team that represented Siti Nafirah, the plaintiff in the first legal suit filed in 2018.
This public-interest litigation summons the defendants on claims of breaches of statutory duty, the right to education and misfeasance in public office.
According to their legal team, the remedies requested are primarily declarations for the plaintiffs. Any damages will be determined by the courts.
Their case is similar to Nafirah’s, who was in Form 4 in 2015 when her English teacher for that year was said to have been absent from class for seven months in a row.
According to the AskLegal.my website, Nafirah failed her English paper and believes this was the result of the teacher not showing up to class and teaching them adequately.
Despite filing a complaint with the school, her grievances fell on deaf ears.
The principal had allegedly falsified the attendance records of the teacher to make it seem that he was only absent for two months, and allegedly also made other students speak positively of the teacher in a bid to make Nafirah's story hard to believe.
She ended up suing for misfeasance of public office (misusing their powers as public servants), breach of statutory duties under the Education Act 1996, and denying her right under the constitution to access to education.
The parties Nafirah sued petitioned to have her case dismissed, but the high court allowed for her claims to go through in July last year.
After both parties submitted their claims, the court eventually set May 4 to 8 this year for the hearing. But, due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the hearing had to be postponed.
The case was eventually set to be heard in the Kota Kinabalu High Court from November 2 to 6, but again, the hearing was postponed due to the conditional movement control order (CMCO). – The Vibes, December 23, 2020
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