“Elizabeth” faced workplace retaliation from her supervisors after she engaged in a protected activity that she was legally allowed to do.
Elizabeth worked as a special education teacher for a public school. For almost three years, she received positive reviews and feedback from supervisors, and was told that she was doing well in teaching and aiding children. After a period of time, she was reassigned to teach a different group of children for unclear reasons.
After her reassignment, a news article was published that accused the school of discriminating against students with disabilities. Elizabeth was quoted in the article discussing the school’s discriminatory practices, which she was legally allowed to do. The school was aware of the article publication both before and after it went online.
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Immediately following the article publication, Elizabeth began experiencing work retaliation for her comments. Her supervisor came into her classroom unannounced for a performance review, despite having scheduled the review for several days later. Additionally, Elizabeth received poor ratings on this review, despite having no issues in reviews before this time. When Elizabeth asked about these reviews, her supervisor told her that they were because she made coworkers uncomfortable and had missed certain meetings. Prior to this review, her coworkers had described Elizabeth as a nice and hardworking teacher, and her supervisor never provided evidence supporting his claim that her coworkers didn’t like working with her. Additionally, the meetings Elizabeth had missed were meetings she had been given permission to skip.
Over the next few months, Elizabeth experienced several other unannounced performance reviews that also contained poor ratings, and she was eventually told that the school did not want to renew her contract. Prior to this incident, the school had suggested to Elizabeth that they were considering her for tenure. Instead, they attempted to assign her to a fourth year of probationary teaching and move her to a different location. Elizabeth resigned because she felt as though the school had been retaliating against her for several months because of her comments in the news article. Throughout this time, witnesses in the school offered positive feedback of Elizabeth, and even mentioned that they themselves were sometimes afraid to say things about the school’s discrimination for fear of retaliation against them as well.
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We represented Elizabeth in filing a work retaliation complaint against the school with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, pointing out that the school retaliated against Elizabeth by giving her poor reviews and extending her probation after she performed a protected activity. The school settled quickly with us for $120,000 after we sent our demand letter.
We were honored to represent Elizabeth and hold the school accountable for their retaliation against her.
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