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Art Teacher, District Still at Odds Over Injuries

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Times Staff Writer

A meeting between Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District officials, its insurer and art teacher Chizuko de Queiroz has failed to change battle lines in a dispute over whether on-the-job injuries prevent her from returning to the classroom.

Citing numerous claims filed against the district by de Queiroz for emotional and physical injuries suffered between 1983 and last December, the district and its insurer--in a statement read at a Board of Education meeting Monday--said “it is clear from the record” that she “is vulnerable to significant re-injury in her employment.”

‘Ready to Return to Work’

Despite de Queiroz’s “representations that she is ready and willing to return to work” the statement continued, “medical experts (say) that this is not the case.”

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De Queiroz was injured initially when she hurt her back, neck, shoulders and upper arms in 1983 while lifting 50-pound bags of sculpting material, and has aggravated that injury six times in the past five years.

Representatives of the district’s insurer said in interviews Wednesday that her history of injuries compelled her removal from the classroom to prevent future injuries and claims. They said her medical history underscores the need to bar her from returning to work until she is retrained for another job or, if possible, her job is modified to accommodate her injuries.

After an evaluation, a rehabilitation counselor would determine what type of work she could do.

De Queiroz, who has not been in her Palos Verdes High School classroom since she was told March 31 that she could not continue teaching, is as firm about her fitness to work as the district’s insurer is dubious.

Saying that she has learned to live with her disability, she said, “Now that I realize what I can do and what I can’t do, this happens to me. All I can do is teach.”

Supt. Jack Price said the district removed her from the classroom on the advice of the self-insurance pool that covers the district--along with seven other South Bay school systems--in workers’ compensation matters. Palos Verdes pays $600,000 a year to belong. “The district becomes liable, rather than the pool, if we don’t follow the insurer’s advice,” Price said.

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The removal of de Queiroz, 57, from the classroom provoked an outcry on the Palos Verdes High campus.

Faculty, Students Petition

More than 200 students have signed petitions since March asking that she be given back her job. A separate petition was signed by more than 70 faculty members, objecting to the “callous way” she was removed from her job and citing her “outstanding” accomplishments. She has been art department chairman at the high school since 1980, and a teacher in the district for 27 years.

In the last two weeks, the campus petitions generated several news stories in which she discussed aspects of her condition. The resulting publicity led the district, which previously had refused to comment on the case, to go public Monday and disclose more information about her medical and claims history. The four-page statement was written by the insurer.

The release of details of de Queiroz’s medical history was blasted Wednesday by one of de Queiroz’s lawyers, who called it an invasion of her privacy and a breach of confidentiality.

John Huerta, a Pasadena lawyer, termed that and her removal from the classroom “retaliation because she filed workers’ compensation claims.”

De Queiroz said that she had hoped the dispute could be resolved in a closed meeting Monday with the school board, the insurers and attorneys for both sides. The meeting was held prior to the public school board session. Price said the closed session was held “to let her tell her side of the story to the board.”

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List of Claims

De Queiroz said she was upset by the meeting. She went into it thinking that all she needed to return to work was a medical release from the doctor who had examined her for the insurer May 11. Instead, she said, she was “hit” with the list of claims and the insurer’s position that her history indicated she must undergo retraining.

She has refused to do that.

According to Price and Tom Blake, claims manager for the Tustin firm that manages the insurance pool, an injured employee works with a counselor who determines if the person’s job may be modified to accommodate the injury. If this is not possible, the employee is retrained and placed in another job, preferably with the current employer. Disability retirement also is an option.

According to the insurer’s statement, de Queiroz has filed a total of eight claims with the district for physical and emotional injury.

Two of these claims led to cases pending before state Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board in Long Beach: a claim for emotional injury filed in 1988 that covers her entire employment with the district back to 1961, and a Dec. 7, 1988, re-injury to the shoulder, back, neck and arms, and headaches.

In the two appeals, she is seeking payment for medical expenses, as well as possible temporary and/or permanent disability benefits, the statement said.

The statement also cites the April 28, 1983, injuries to the shoulder, neck, back and upper extremities that led to her removal from the classroom on March 31.

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Disability Rating

In 1986, she was awarded a 41 3/4% permanent disability rating and $25,819, which, she said, she has been receiving in monthly payments of $130. She said the money is used for household help to do tasks she is no longer able to perform because of her injuries.

Michael Nezen, attorney for the insurance pool, said Wednesday that de Queiroz is not just a “dedicated, neat lady that everybody admires” but a litigant with two lawsuits against the district.

“We are looking at possible expenses,” he said. “There is a history of claims, through the current claim. We are concerned over re-injury. . . . There is no assurance they will not continue.”

He said the initial 1983 case cost insurers $59,138 in awards and legal fees and said, “We are facing expenses from the two pending claims.”

De Queiroz, in a statement she wrote this week to set out her position, said she “had to bring suit against the district because when I have injured myself at work, the district recorded it as sickness and not as a job injury,” complicating her efforts to win workers’ compensation payments. When the district incorrectly records an injury, she said, a teacher can lose sick pay and is unable to document an on-the-job injury.

‘Take Action’

Her statement said that to protect “one’s rights, it appears that one has to take legal action against a group as powerful as the district and the school board, whose insensitive and uncaring actions can often be injurious” to their workers.

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De Queiroz said the pending appeal of the emotional injury claim stems from stress she felt in May, 1988, as she tried to stave off cuts in performing arts and visual arts programs at the high school. She thought she was having a heart attack and was hospitalized. “I had chest pains and could not breathe,” she said.

She said the district told her she could have no workers’ compensation coverage for $500 in subsequent psychiatric bills and so she filed the stress claim in November, 1988. “I believe the stress was caused by unreasonable school administration and district dictates,” her statement read.

Though filed last year, that claim encompasses stress accumulated since she began working for the district in 1961.

De Queiroz said the second appeal--for injuries last Dec. 7--stems from a day she spent using a hand-held machine to cut mats used to mount and frame art work. As she went to her car, she said, she felt a pain in her arms and shoulders. That evening she could not move her arms, or use her arms and hands for several days. She had to have physical therapy and medication.

Five Minor Injuries

Prior to that injury, “I had been feeling really good and thought I was really well and all was fine with my body,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “I was doing exercise, doing my physical therapy.”

She said earlier physical injury claims--for five minor injuries for such things as shoulder and neck pain between 1985 and 1988--all stemmed from the injury incurred on April 28, 1983. The district’s insurer accepted those claims, and paid medical expenses, she said.

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The first physical injury, de Queiroz said, happened as she was lifting 50-pound bags of materials and putting them in containers to make a solution used in stone sculpting.

“I did this all the time,” she said in the interview, “but this day as I was doing this, it felt like I was being knifed in the upper and lower shoulder. It was intense pain and I slumped to the floor. I felt like I was having a heart attack.” She said she was taken to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Harbor City and missed two days of school. The claim was settled in 1986.

De Queiroz contends that as a result of the injury last December, she has stopped carrying and lifting and heavy repetitive work. She has had two art assistants do the lifting for her.

$43,000 Annual Salary

“I know my limitations . . . what I can do and what I can’t do,” she said, adding that the insurers and the district should not look at numbers but “look at me as a human being.”

Price said de Queiroz is receiving her $43,000 annual salary until her sick leave runs out. He did not know when that would be. He said whether she can receive her full salary under workers’ compensation depends on the resolution of her December, 1988, claim.

The school district wants de Queiroz to enter a rehabilitation program conducted by a trained rehabilitation counselor through the workers’ compensation board but so far, she has refused.

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“We are perfectly willing to consider any kind of workplace modification that would be acceptable to the vocational rehab people and that would allow her to return to work,” Price said. But he said the district’s “hands are tied” until de Queiroz agrees to work with a counselor.

De Queiroz said she does not require rehabilitation. She said she has already made modifications in her work, using student assistants, so she does not have to do tasks such as lifting that have led to re-injury.

Retraining Recommended

Price, however, said there “always have been promises (by her) that she could change, that she would no longer do these things, would use assistants. That didn’t happen.”

According to the insurer’s statement read at the board meeting, Dr. Ray L. Craemer, a Torrance physician who has periodically examined de Queiroz since 1983, recommended in February that she be retrained so she can avoid re-injury and greater disability.

Attorney Nezen said Wednesday that there is only a “slight possibility” that she can go back into her art classroom. But de Queiroz contends Craemer told her the district can make accommodations in the classroom that allow her to continue in her present job.

Price said de Queiroz was sent to another doctor, Dr. Alan Roberts, “because of her insistence that she can do the job.” He said Roberts’ report is expected at the end of May and if he concludes she is fit to return to the classroom, she will be able to resume teaching.

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Removed for Medical Reasons

Price said the statement by the insurer was read at the Monday board meeting to show that de Queiroz was removed from the classroom for medical reasons and not--as she and some of her supporters contend--as retaliation for a dispute over the purchase of art supplies last year.

Price said a clerical error resulted in the purchase of supplies from a retailer rather than a wholesaler, as de Queiroz recommended, resulted in an order for supplies costing the art department an additional $500. He said $276 was put back into the high school’s account in September after de Queiroz told the district of the error.

But, he said, she “got all upset” at a administrator-department head meeting in March, saying that even more should have been returned to the high school account. The balance, a total of $500, was subsequently returned to the account.

De Queiroz insists that none of the money was returned to the high school account until she insisted on it at a school meeting on March 14. Three days later, she said, “$523 was put back in the art budget” and a few days after that, she was told she could no longer teach. She contends her removal is a vindictive response to her criticism of the administrators.

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