Special needs assistant awarded €255k over school harassment

A special needs assistant has been awarded €255,000 by the High Court for bullying and harassment by the school she worked in.

Mr Justice Iarfhlaith O’Neill described the “severe” and “unmerited” treatment of Una Ruffley by the board of management of St Anne’s National School in the Curragh, Co Kildare, as persistent, inappropriate behaviour which wholly undermined her dignity at work.

He said principal Pauline Dempsey’s account of the complaint against Ms Ruffley to a board meeting was “almost certainly untrue, highly biased, coloured, and grossly and unfairly damnified” Ms Ruffley, who had worked in the school for 14 years.

He also found it reprehensible that Ms Dempsey had “trumped up” an additional complaint against her.

The judge said the board of the school, which provides education for children with special needs, failed to properly respond to Ms Ruffley’s efforts to have the matter dealt with through internal disciplinary procedures and left her with no option but to take legal action.

He awarded her €140,276 for loss of past and future earnings and €115,000 in general damages.

The judge said the case arose from an incident on September 14, 2009, when Ms Ruffley was with a pupil in the school’s “sensory room”, used for one-to-one development of a child’s sensory perception.

At issue in this case was whether it was normal practice that the door to the room should be locked or just closed, as it generally accepted that the sensory programme should be done without interruption.

The judge said he accepted evidence of Ms Ruffley and other special needs assistants that it was general practice to lock the door.

When the pupil Ms Ruffley was dealing with that day fell asleep, she phoned the class teacher, who told her to allow him sleep for another 20 minutes. The child, who had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, had a tendency to run from room to room when equipment was being set up, the court heard.

The principal, Ms Dempsey, tried to gain entry three times before Ms Ruffley opened the door, which later gave rise to disciplinary moves against her.

It was extraordinary that, up to the day of this incident, no issue had arisen about the locking of the door even though the school had a comprehensive safety statement, the judge said.

Ms Ruffley had been subjected to disciplinary sanction of a severe kind which was unmerited, the judge said, adding that it was hard to understand how “an educated, sophisticated person” such as Ms Dempsey could have arrived at the conclusions she did “without an element of bad faith”.