Welch v. State Teachers' Retirement System

Opinion

ROBIE, J.

In this case, we chronicle a schoolteacher’s more than decade-long trip through a bureaucratic maze created by California’s State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), which for years misinformed her and other applicants for disability retirement of the applicable eligibility requirements.

In October 1998, plaintiff Melanie Welch was attacked by a group of students while working as a teacher in Oakland. Following the attack, Welch never worked as a full-time teacher again. Welch, who had less than five *4years of service credits at the time of the attack, claimed that because of…