Borja, PSS fail to reach accord in 2-year-old EEOC complaint

More than two years later, the complaint filed by former education commissioner Dr. David Borja with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against his successor, Dr. Rita A. Sablan, remains unresolved after the failure of both parties to reach a settlement.

Borja confirmed the status of his case with the Saipan Tribune in an email yesterday, saying he intends to pursue and continue his fight.

Borja was fired by the Board of Education in June 2008. He then served as a classroom teacher for Marianas High School until 2010. He is now based in Gloucester, Virginia.

Borja filed the EEOC complaint against Saipan after the latter denied him some benefits that he believes are rightfully due him.

Borja, who was first hired as a classroom teacher for the Public School System in July 1994, was an off-island hire who came to the CNMI from St. Louis, Missouri. At that time, he was entitled to housing allowance and repatriation ticket. When he left the commissioner’s office in June 2008, he was immediately hired as a classroom teacher at Marianas High School and his two-year contract expired in September 2010.

Borja claims that his contract stipulates that “upon renewal of an excepted services employment contract, all repatriation benefits stipulated under Section 8 of the condition of employment in this contract shall be carried over into the renewed contract until such time that the employee is officially terminated from the PSS.”

Borja believes that among the benefits due him include reimbursement for his repatriation to his initial point of hire, Missouri; payment for services he rendered for summer school; and a balance of the housing benefit that he said he was shortchanged back in 1994. He said he should also have been offered the same benefit of use for extended day credit that other PSS leaders got.

He said yesterday that he and PSS were able to reach the mediation stage in the EEOC process.

“Although the mediation was a success for me [PSS was to make a payment settlement for my unpaid repatriation cost], there was a glitch that made it more evident that PSS management was discriminatory. I was asked to sign a supplementary agreement drafted unilaterally by PSS and I had to sign,” Borja said in his email.

He said he refused to sign the supplementary agreement and asked that PSS also recognize the hours he worked on after-school programs for students who needed to earn promotion or high school graduation credits.

“These hours were worked and provided by me in good faith to be compensated during school years covered with my last contract with PSS from 2008 to 2010. There were other issues that I asked to be addressed and made changes to the supplementary agreement. They did not want to amend the supplementary agreement,” he added.

Just recently, Borja said, he received a phone call from the Honolulu EEOC office that his EEOC complaint has not been resolved.