Outland v. Monmouth-Ocean Educ. Service Com'n

• Citation: 713 A.2d 460,154 N.J. 531
• Decision Date: 01 July 1998
• Docket Number: MONMOUTH-OCEAN
• Parties: , 127 Ed. Law Rep. 897 Mona J. OUTLAND, Petitioner-Appellant, v.EDUCATION SERVICE COMMISSION, Respondent-Respondent.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court (New Jersey)

Page 531

154 N.J. 531

713 A.2d 460, 127 Ed. Law Rep. 897

Mona J. OUTLAND, Petitioner-Appellant, v. MONMOUTH-OCEAN EDUCATION SERVICE COMMISSION, Respondent-Respondent.

Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Argued Jan. 21, 1998.

Decided July 1, 1998.

Bruce Fromer, for petitioner-appellant (Nelson & Fromer, Ocean, attorneys; Wendi S. Ledwitz, Springfield, on the brief).

Robert Silver, Woodbridge, for respondent-respondent (Michals, Wahl, Silver & Leitner, attorneys).

Aileen M. O'Driscoll, Newark, for amicus curiae New Jersey Education Association (Zazzali, Zazzali, Fagella & Nowak, attorneys; Ms. O'Driscoll, Richard A. Friedman and Kathleen A. Naprstek, on the letter briefs).

Cynthia J. Jahn, Director Legal Department, argued the cause for amicus curiae New Jersey School Boards Association.

The opinion of the Court was delivered by

O'HERN, J.

We granted certification to consider an asserted conflict between the decision below and that in Porter v. Elizabeth Board of Education, 281 N.J.Super. 13, 656 A.2d 443 (App.Div.), certif. denied, 142 N.J. 455, 663 A.2d 1361 (1995). The issue in each case is whether a teacher employed under a ten-month contract, injured at work during the school year, is entitled to temporary disability benefits in workers' compensation during the summer recess period.

The conflict involves the interpretation of N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1. That section ensures that school employees who are unable to report to work because of injuries they received in the course of their employment receive their full salaries and lose no sick leave during the period of their disability. The section reads as follows:

Whenever any employee, entitled to sick leave under this chapter, is absent from his post of duty as a result of a personal injury caused by an accident arising out of and in the course of his employment, his employer shall pay to such employee the full salary or wages for the period of such absence for up to one calendar year without having such absence charged to the annual sick leave or the accumulated sick leave provided in sections 18A:30-2 and 18A:30-3.... Any amount of salary

or wages paid or payable to the employee pursuant to this section shall be reduced by the amount of any work[ers'] compensation award made for temporary disability.

[ N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1.]

I

Mona J. Outland is employed by the Monmouth-Ocean Education Service Commission. (We shall refer to it as the Board.) A teacher of emotionally disturbed children, Outland suffered severe and disabling injuries when one of her students assaulted her on April 22, 1994. She was unable to return to work from April 23, 1994 to June 30, 1994, when the summer vacation period commenced.

At the time of her injury, Outland's weekly salary was $593. Despite her absence from school, she received 100% of that salary over the remainder of the school year: seventy percent ($415) by way of temporary disability benefits under a section of the Workers' Compensation Act, N.J.S.A. 34:15-12, and the remaining thirty percent ($178) under N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1.

Teachers normally are paid on the basis of an academic year rather than a calendar year. Most teachers thus do not receive pay checks during the summer, when schools are in recess. N.J.S.A. 18A:29-3, however, allows school boards to offer academic-year employees the option to have ten percent of their salaries withheld and then paid over the summer. A statement accompanying that legislation recites that the amounts paid during the summer to employees who select that so-called "twelve-month plan" are deemed to have been earned as of the preceding June 30th. Introductory Statement, Assembly, No. 3679, L. 1979, c. 495. Outland, however, had not elected to be paid on the twelve-month plan. Outland therefore, by the end of the school year, had received 100% of the salary that the Board had agreed to pay her for that school year.

Outland's disability payments ceased after June 30, 1994. Although the Board did not dispute that disability payments would Outland filed a motion for temporary disability benefits in the Division of Workers' Compensation. She argued that the Board's payment of benefits equal to seventy percent of her weekly wage, which the Board had been paying pursuant to N.J.S.A. 34:15-12, should continue over the summer. She has not claimed, neither in the Division nor on appeal, that the Board was obligated by N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1 to pay the remaining thirty percent of her weekly salary during the summer recess.

have to resume at the beginning of the next academic year had Outland not been able to return to work by then, the Board refused to pay benefits to Outland over the summer recess, which ran from July 1 to August 31, 1994.

While her matter was pending, the Appellate Division rendered its Porter decision. 281 N.J.Super. 13, 656 A.2d 443. Donald Porter was a teacher in Elizabeth who sustained a back injury while teaching. The Division of Workers' Compensation (the Division), among other rulings, ordered the Elizabeth Board of Education to pay Porter temporary disability benefits over the summer. On the school board's appeal, the Appellate Division affirmed the Division's holding on that issue. In interpreting N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1, the court focused on the Legislature's use of the term "calendar year." The court was "convinced that the Legislature, in utilizing the term 'calendar year' rather than 'school year' as the applicable time period, [intended] that school board employees be fully compensated for the time during which they are temporarily disabled without regard to whether that disability falls within the school year or the summer recess." 281 N.J.Super. at 21, 656 A.2d 443. The effect of the Appellate Division's decision was that teachers who had elected to be paid on the regular ten-month plan, who were temporarily disabled as a result of injuries suffered in the course of their employment, and whose disabilities lasted beyond the end of the school year would continue to receive temporary disability benefits under workers' compensation during the summer recess regardless of whether those teachers had planned to take summer jobs.

The compensation judge followed Porter and awarded Outland $3,675.71 in workers' compensation temporary disability benefits, an amount equal to 70% of her weekly salary multiplied by the number of weeks in the summer recess. The Board appealed. The Appellate Division reversed the award of the compensation judge. Disagreeing with the Porter decision, the Outland panel concluded that neither N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1 nor the Workers' Compensation Act was intended to provide injured workers with a means to recover wages that were not lost. 295 N.J.Super. at 397, 685 A.2d 68. Because there was no evidence that Outland had "lost" any wages over the summer, and because during the summer she was not "absent from [her] post of duty" as a teacher, the Appellate Division held that neither of the relevant statutes entitled her to disability payments over the summer. Id. at 398, 685 A.2d 68.

II

We agree with so much of the Appellate Division's Outland decision that holds that the sick leave provisions of the education laws do not serve to amend the workers' compensation laws to create an entitlement to temporary disability benefits that would not otherwise exist under those laws. The parties have briefed the issue of whether we should read N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1 in pari materia with N.J.S.A. 34:15-12. We need not resolve that issue because the portion of N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1 that Outland would have us read into N.J.S.A. 34:15-12 does not carry the meaning Outland would like it to carry. The Legislature used the term "calendar year" in N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1 in order to establish the maximum duration of a school board's obligation to pay the full salary of an injured employee, not to establish any sort of affirmative obligation of an employer to pay benefits during the summer or any other point in a year when the teacher would not have earned a salary for teaching. See Williams v. Board of Educ. of Deptford Township, 192 N.J.Super. 31, 40-41, 469 A.2d 58 (App.Div.1983) (construing "calendar year" language in N.J.S.A Correctly understood, the significance of the "calendar year" language for a teacher whose inability to work began toward the end of a school year and lasted through the summer is that the payments due under N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1, after ceasing during the summer months when the teacher would not have taught, would have to resume in the fall when the teacher would otherwise have returned to the classroom. The payments would then continue until the first anniversary of the commencement of the teacher's disability, provided the disability lasted that long.

18A:30-2.1 to require compensation for covered absences within 365 days of date of injury). It did not use the term "calendar year" to confer on injured workers a double recovery or windfall. Nor would the drafters of the Workers' Compensation Act have favored a double recovery. See N.J.S.A. 34:15-40 (entitling providers of workers' compensation benefits to [713 A.2d 464] recover amounts paid to injured employee by third parties, up to the amount of workers' compensation benefits paid); Midland Ins. Co. v. Colatrella, 102 N.J. 612, 618, 510 A.2d 30 (1986) (affirming application of workers' compensation lien to proceeds recovered by injured worker from his uninsured motorist policy, when worker had previously recovered workers' compensation benefits).

Understood in the context of N.J.S.A. 18A:30-2.1, the workers' compensation temporary disability benefits payable under N.J.S.A. 34:15-12, serve, during the school year, as a credit toward the disability income due to the occupationally injured teacher under the sick leave statute. During the summer recess period the workers' compensation temporary disability benefits serve to replace the wages lost from other employment because of the occupational injury. No...