Her insurer said she was gone - her employer said her job was waiting
A cosmetology school worker’s fight for unemployment benefits collapsed - not because of her employer, but her own testimony.
The Delaware Superior Court on October 14, 2026 upheld the denial of unemployment benefits to a former learning leader at Paul Mitchell The School Delaware, finding she had not shown she was genuinely available for work after a pregnancy-related leave.
The employee started at the school in 2022 and went on leave in December 2024 for a high-risk pregnancy. Her newborn then needed constant care for breathing complications. Her doctor cleared her to return on April 28, 2025.
That is where things got complicated.
She asked the school’s co-owner about remote work so she could stay close to her baby. The school said no - its hands-on training model and state licensing rules made remote roles impossible. She never went back.
The co-owner insisted the employee had never been terminated. The school had simply made her inactive in its systems and was “really just still waiting for her to be approved to return.”
But the paper trail painted a different picture. The school had cut her access to internal platforms and disabled her email. Her insurer sent a letter stating the school had reported she was “no longer with their organization.”
The Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board sided with the school. It found the employee was medically unable to work until April 2025, and after that date, her insistence on remote-only work amounted to a “self-imposed restriction” that did not satisfy Delaware’s requirement to be “available for work.”
The employee had a card she could not play. She also worked for Prometric, which had accommodated her return - in person, not remotely. A letter from Prometric confirmed she worked on-site from early morning to late afternoon. That would have undercut the Board’s central finding.
The court acknowledged this created “an incomplete factual picture” with evidence “directly contradicting” the Board’s conclusion. But the letter was not part of the record below, and the court could not consider it.
What sank her case was her own testimony. Across multiple hearings, she told the Board she needed remote work to return to the school. She never clarified she could work in person. She never contacted the school to say she was ready to come back in her old role.
For HR teams, the case is a practical flag: what you do during a leave - pulling system access, notifying insurers - builds a record that can contradict what you say later. And for employees, the testimony you give in unemployment proceedings can become the evidence that defines the outcome.
