Two Newark Public Schools teachers won in court after they charged, in separate filings, that then-principal of Rafael Hernandez School, Natasha Pared, had given them poor evaluations and suspended them for a full school year without pay in retaliation for their Newark Teachers Union activities.

The teachers at the pre-K-8th grade school, Sanyka Montague and Jennifer Ferrara, are both tenured. Arbiters for each teacher ruled in their favor. State Superior Court Judge Lisa Adubato confirmed the rulings and ordered the teachers reinstated with full back pay. The principal, Natasha Pared, is now principal at troubled Barringer High School where nine out of ten students can’t read at grade-level, math scores are worse, and average SAT scores are 382 in reading and 365 in math.

According to Advance Media, the district attempted earlier in the litigation to get the arbiters to throw out the teachers’ motions. Neither the district nor Pared responded to requests for content.

The teachers have a long history of positive evaluations but over the last two years Pared described poor performance, failure to file lesson plans, and failure to comply with Newark’s masking rules. The arbiters found the evaluations were “subjective” and “motivated by the principal’s anti-union bias.” New Jersey’s teacher tenure law requires that only tenured teachers with two consecutive years of poor evaluations can be fired.

The Newark Teachers Union’s lawyer says he is giving the district two weeks to comply with the judge’s order and will file a complaint if Newark doesn’t meet the deadline for making the teachers “whole.”