Six months after a Belizean court upheld the overturning of his unlawful firing, a veteran music teacher at Corozal Community College (CCC) remains in limbo, locked out of thousands of dollars in back pay and forced to delay his earned long leave until 2027.
Renan Ruiz, the CCC music instructor at the center of the years-long employment dispute, first faced termination from the college in October 2024. The Belize Teaching Service Commission greenlit the dismissal following disciplinary proceedings centered on private messages Ruiz sent to his students. While the Teaching Service Appeals Tribunal acknowledged that the messaging was inappropriate, noting in its ruling that “a teacher under no circumstances should be messaging his/her students especially after hours,” the panel concluded that the permanent dismissal penalty was excessively harsh for the offense.
In September 2025, the tribunal quashed Ruiz’s termination, imposing a far more lenient penalty: forfeiture of one and a half months’ pay and mandatory completion of eight professional counselling sessions. Refusing to accept the tribunal’s ruling, CCC launched a legal challenge, taking the case to the nation’s High Court. On March 20, 2026, Justice Rajiv Goonetilleke rejected the college’s request for judicial review and ordered CCC to cover all of Ruiz’s legal fees stemming from the challenge.
With the court’s final ruling in his favor, Ruiz’s legal representative, attorney Nazira Uc Myles, formally submitted a claim for $69,580.75 in unpaid back salary and employment stipends that had been withheld since Ruiz’s 2024 dismissal. Just weeks after the High Court ruling, on April 10, 2026, CCC board chairman Father Thomas Stone publicly confirmed the board’s intention to comply with the tribunal’s order, formally requesting the Belize Ministry of Education disburse all owed wages to Ruiz covering the entire period from his October 2024 dismissal through April 2026. On that same day, CCC’s legal counsel Immanuel Williams stated that the college had never received any salary funds allocated for Ruiz, claiming all intended payments had been retained by the Ministry of Education.
Internal correspondence obtained by News 5 reveals a critical gap in the proposed back payment: the Ministry has only offered to cover wages from September 2025 (the date of the tribunal’s initial ruling) through March 2026, leaving more than 10 months of wages between the 2024 dismissal and 2025 ruling unpaid — the exact period the CCC board explicitly requested the Ministry cover.
Ruiz has formally contested the truncated payment arrangement in writing, questioning why only partial back pay is being offered when the tribunal only mandated he forfeit 6 weeks of salary. As of late September 2026, Ruiz confirms he has not received any of the owed funds. He adds that key institutional leadership changes have left his case stalled: the Anglican Church, which oversees the college, re-assigned former board chairman Father Stone to a post outside of Belize, while the college principal (who also serves as board secretary) is currently on extended leave, leaving no one to resolve the outstanding payment issue.
Beyond the unpaid wages, Ruiz has also been forced to postpone his long-delayed approved long leave. In an August 2026 letter to Teaching Service Commission chairman Claudio Leal, Ruiz explained that the principal had initially approved his leave request, but the slot was reassigned to three other teachers who were granted September 2026 leave. Ruiz was told he would have to wait until April 2027 to take his earned leave. “This situation was not caused by me,” Ruiz wrote in his letter. “As such, I believe the responsibility for managing the approved leave scheduling should primarily rest with the school, in coordination with the Commission, in order to avoid unnecessary delays for my service and leave entitlements.”
To date, no government or school official has informed Ruiz who authorized the partial payment limitation, when he can expect to receive the remaining owed wages, or whether the 10-month period between his dismissal and the tribunal’s ruling will count toward his accumulated years of service for pension and benefits purposes.
News 5 reached out to Dian Maheia, Chief Executive Officer of the Belize Ministry of Education, for comment on the dispute. Maheia stated she was not able to discuss the details of the case at this time but committed to issuing a response once she is cleared to do so. Reporters also contacted CCC for comment, where the acting principal declined to answer any questions, noting he does not have authorization from the college board to speak to the media.