Teacher who repaired laptops while teaching science deserves line-of-duty death recognition, union says

The family of the late Yun Beom-jin, a teacher at Tangjeong Middle School in Asan, South Chungcheong Province who died last year, and a teachers union are urging authorities to recognize his death as a line-of-duty fatality. They called on officials to consider the excessive workload Yun carried — teaching classes, managing equipment, and taking on temporary homeroom and department head duties.

The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union Federation and the South Chungcheong Teachers Union held a press conference Wednesday outside the Ministry of Personnel Management in Sejong, demanding line-of-duty recognition. "We cannot reduce the deceased's day-to-day life to a single line on a duty roster," they said.

Yun taught science at Tangjeong Middle School before dying on Oct. 4 last year. His family filed a claim for line-of-duty survivors' benefits in September. The case is awaiting a factual investigation by the National Pension Service and a review by the Ministry of Personnel Management.

According to the teachers union, Yun taught 22 hours of classes per week at a school with 46 classes and roughly 1,300 students. He also handled all audiovisual and broadcast operations for the entire school — managing electronic whiteboards and podiums, and setting up and repairing fellow teachers' laptops.

In June last year, he stepped in as a temporary homeroom teacher for a colleague who could no longer perform those duties after a classroom incident. In August, he was appointed head of the science and information department. The union said his existing workload did not decrease when the new responsibilities were added.

His family and legal representatives said Yun moved back and forth between the main building and two modular structures every time equipment broke down. Even during school vacations, he came in nearly every day to set up broadcast equipment for civil service examination venues.

Lesson preparation he could not finish at school continued at home. Kim Hee-jeong, chairwoman of the Secondary School Teachers Union, said the school only outsourced IT device maintenance to an outside contractor after Yun's death. "The fact that someone was somehow getting it done is not proof that it was something they could handle," she said.

The family said Yun had visibly lost weight and grown fearful of going to work from late September onward. His spouse appealed to the government, saying: "If a structure puts the most responsible and diligent people at the greatest risk, that is not an individual problem — it is a problem of the organization and the system. I hope the state does not turn its back on my husband's death."

The teachers union said the South Chungcheong Provincial Office of Education had also issued an official opinion stating that Yun performed duties beyond the normal scope of a teacher's work and that line-of-duty recognition should be actively considered.

The two unions called on the National Pension Service to thoroughly investigate Yun's actual workload and accumulated burden. They also demanded that the school and the South Chungcheong Provincial Office of Education verify any duties that may have gone unrecorded and submit the relevant documentation.

Song Su-yeon, chairwoman of the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union Federation, said authorities must look not at each task in isolation but at the fact that a large number of responsibilities were concentrated on a single person. "The state must now fully examine the workload and suffering this teacher bore, and answer with line-of-duty recognition," she said.