A former teacher who claims St. Paul Public Schools retaliated against him for speaking out against its racial-equity practices should not be allowed to proceed with a lawsuit because he quit his job, the district said this week.
In a motion to dismiss his complaint in U.S. District Court, school district lawyers said Aaron Benner was not harmed by a series of personnel investigations that he says were retaliatory.
“Investigations are not adverse employment action unless they lead to adverse, tangible changes in terms and conditions of employment,” the district said, asserting that Benner lost no pay, benefits or career prospects.
Benner was a tenured teacher and had an assignment in the district for the upcoming school year when he quit in August 2015 to work for a charter school. Benner said in his complaint that he anticipated that he could be fired.
Benner, who is black, found himself in the spotlight after telling the school board in May 2014 that the district was doing a disservice to African-American students by failing to discipline them for bad behavior.
In the year that followed, the district open four investigations into Benner:
- Two days after a boy punched a girl unconscious at John A. Johnson Elementary, Benner called the mothers of both children and found that neither had been notified about what happened. When the girl’s mother then called principal Lisa Gruenewald, Benner was disciplined for violating the district’s data-privacy policy by sharing information about the students.
- Benner was disciplined again for telling one student that another had accused him of breaking someone’s glass, which led to the first student threatening the other.
- In a third case, he was investigated for calling in sick but produced a doctor’s note.
- Finally, he was disciplined for leaving his classroom to deliver a behavior referral. In that case, Benner agreed he made a mistake.
Besides retaliation, Benner accused the district of racial discrimination and creating a hostile work environment. He said the district did not scrutinize the school’s white teachers for similar actions.
In response, the district said that the situations with other teachers were not actually similar, that there was no reason to believe his race was the reason Benner was investigated, and that his claims are not serious enough for a hostile-workplace finding.
Benner sued in May after the St. Paul Department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity found probable cause that the school district violated the city’s human rights ordinance.
Benner said this week that the district “must have forgotten” about that finding.
The district, which refused to discuss a possible settlement, said in its motion that the human rights office erred in interpreting investigations and discipline memos as “adverse employment action.”
A hearing on the motion is set for Oct. 6.