In Connecticut, employees who engage in public sector collective bargaining with a board of education employer, fall into two categories: (1) those covered by the Teacher Negotiation Act (“TNA”), i.e., teachers and administrators; and (2) those covered by the Municipal Employee Relations Act (“MERA”), i.e., all other bargaining units. Both the TNA and the MERA…
John Shea
You may recall my colleague Zachary Schurin’s recent discussion of Doe V. Regional School Unit 26. In that matter, the Maine Supreme Court determined that the defendant school district’s requirement that a transgender student utilize a unisex staff bathroom, instead of the communal student bathroom for girls (the gender the student identified with), violated a…
Attorney Mark J. Sommaruga, a member of Pullman & Comley LLC’s Education and Labor & Employment practice and its Diversity Committee, was a panelist and presenter at a discussion on November 20, 2014 at the University of Connecticut School of Law. The UConn Law School’s Diversity Committee hosted the panel discussion, “Bridging the Gap Between Personality…
I recently attended a meeting where Charles Krich, the Principal Attorney for the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (“CHRO”), spoke about the future of the agency. Attorney Krich stated that the agency is seeking to become a more active “civil rights agency” and is expanding its reach beyond the landlord-tenant and employer-employee relationships…
Most public entities are now intimately familiar with the long reach of the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) into the conduct of agency meetings. A recent case from the Freedom of Information Commission (“FOIC”) reminds us that whether a “meeting” that has occurred must comply with the FOIA, is more than just an existential question,…
