The Ministry of Education acted unlawfully in stopping the pay of a teacher who refused to return to work at CedarBridge Academy after she became ill due to a mould allergy, a court heard yesterday.

Mother-of-four Ulama Finn-Hendrickson went on sick leave from the Island's largest school in October 2006, a month before it was closed down due to fears about the indoor air quality.

The Devonshire campus reopened two months later after a cleanup of mould but Mrs. Finn-Hendrickson refused to return to the building without proof that it was a safe environment in which to work.

The Ministry of Education ignored letters from her lawyer asking for such evidence and stopped her pay without telling her at the end of January 2007.

During a civil case brought by Mrs. Finn-Hendrickson against Education Minister Randy Horton at Supreme Court yesterday, her lawyer Paul Harshaw asked Puisne Judge Ian Kawaley to quash the "apparent" decision of the Ministry to terminate or suspend her employment without notice.

Mr. Harshaw said: "The applicant does not know if she has been suspended without pay and without notice, terminated without notice or if some other punishment or penalty has been inflicted on her without notice."

He alleged that his 55-year-old client was made sick in the first place by the Ministry's failure to ensure that CedarBridge was a safe place to work as it is bound to do under the Occupational Safety and Health at Work Act 1982. "The Government is now seeking to punish the applicant for making her ill," he told the judicial review.

Martin Johnson, a lawyer from the Attorney General's chambers acting for the Minister, argued that proof the school was safe was given in a press statement delivered publicly by the Minister and passed to Bermuda Union of Teachers (BUT). He accepted that the Ministry should have written to her but suggested that "she did not make herself available for work" and should have turned up at Ministry headquarters and asked to be reassigned.

"If you are being paid by the Government for doing nothing and you sit at home and you can't answer the phone... attempts were made to contact her. You can't sit back and do nothing. Everybody has to be reasonable. I think that the Ministry did everything that was reasonable apart from notifying the applicant personally."

He claimed Mrs. Finn-Hendrickson, a Jamaican who came to Bermuda in 2000 to work at CedarBridge, "dismissed herself" by failing to show up for work.

But Mr. Justice Kawaley questioned that conclusion. "When someone has written two lawyer's letters saying 'I'm not coming back to work', how on earth can that be considered as a disciplinary offence which would justify this summary penalty?" he said.

He asked Mr. Johnson: "Wasn't it incumbent on the Ministry, before they stopped her pay, to tell her something at least? To just stop somebody's pay when they are waiting for you to respond to lawyer's letters is a strange thing for an employer to do."

He reserved his judgement to a later date.