Welch

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 *4 years of service credits at the time of the attack, claimed that because of misinformation she received from a telephone representative of defendant CalSTRS in January or February 1999 about the amount of service credits she needed to be eligible for CalSTRS benefits, she did not apply for disability retirement benefits at that time. In 2005, however, after learning she did not need five years of service credits if she was disabled because of the attack, Welch applied for disability retirement benefits from CalSTRS.

Finding no evidence Welch had been misinformed about her ability to apply for disability retirement benefits in 1999, CalSTRS rejected Welch’s application…