Belasco v. Warrensville Heights City School

634 F. App'x 507
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedDecember 11, 2015
Docket15-3131
StatusUnpublished
Cited by21 cases

This text of 634 F. App'x 507 (Belasco v. Warrensville Heights City School) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Belasco v. Warrensville Heights City School, 634 F. App'x 507 (6th Cir. 2015).

Opinion

OPINION

JULIA SMITH GIBBONS, Circuit Judge.

Norma Belasco, formerly a teacher in the Warrensville Heights (Ohio) City School District, appeals the district court’s order granting summary judgment to de *509 fendants on her claims alleging discrimination on the basis of disability and violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act, We affirm the judgment of the district court.

I.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1959, Norma Belasco spent the majority of her career as a teacher. In 1998, the Warrensville Heights City School District (“the District”) hired her as a teacher of gifted students. The next year, she took a position in Oxford, Ohio, but she returned to the District in August 2005, again as a teacher of gifted students. The District granted her a continuing contract in 2009. In 2010, Belasco was assigned to Eastwood Elementary School. Funding cuts forced closure of the gifted program, so the District reassigned Belasco to a regular fourth-grade classroom starting in the 2011-2012 school year.

Belasco by this time had serious health problems. She had been suffering from renal failure since 2007, and before her eventual kidney transplant in April 2013, she required dialysis three times per week. She also has heart disease, had heart surgery in 2010, and has a pacemaker. Belas-co says that she suffered from shortness of breath, cramps in her limbs, balance problems, and fatigue, and that she sometimes needed a walker. Her transfer to the fourth-grade classroom did not go well. Belasco concedes that her “class was not controlled properly.” Hr’g Tr. 434:1-2, May 24, 2012, EOF No. 31-1. She points to three boys in her fourth-grade class, who were disruptive, she says, to the point of being “dangerous,” “beyond [her] ability to deal with them.” Belasco Dep. 22:2-7, July 17, 2014, EOF No. 41-1. She was “afraid that they might knock [her] down” and that she “might get hurt.” Belasco Dep. 22:12-14. Felicia Woods-Wallace, principal of the school, agrees that Belas-co’s students were fighting frequently, at least three times a week, causing disturbances that required intervention by the principal’s office. Belasco states that although she did not request a full- or part-time teacher’s aide at that point, she did ask for “somebody to help [her], even if it was only two or three hours a week, just so that I would have some support.” Be-lasco Dep. 24:23-25. Belasco also requested that one or more of the three boys be placed in a different classroom. Although the boys were occasionally suspended, they resumed their misbehavior as soon as they returned.

In a deposition, Belasco discussed the connection between her inability to manage the students and her putative disability:

Q. Was your inability to deal with them related to your perceived disability, what you say is your disability?
A. Only in that I was afraid for the children’s safety, but I was also afraid that they might knock me down; I might get hurt,, too.
Q. [W]as your inability to deal with the students and, as you have described it, a result of the limitations that you suffered or a result of their behaviors?
A. A result of their behavior.
Q. So when you requested assistance, you were requesting assistance to deal ■with their behaviors, not assistance to perform your duties as a result of the limitations that you experienced?
A. Well, they were related, obviously.
Q. How were they related?
A. As I said, my balance and things like that were not perfect, so I was a little afraid that the children would hurt each other, but also could knock me down, which has happened with teachers.
*510 Q. Did you ever have [that] happen with you?
A. It didn’t happen with me, but I was afraid.

Belasco Dep. 22:9-28:13.

At a hearing, the school security guard testified that she had to respond to Belas-co’s classroom as many as “four [or] five times during the day, sometimes more[,]” because “[k]ids were out of control. She couldn’t deal with the kids in there.” Hr’g Tr. 22:4-7. According to the security guard, on the occasions when she responded to Belasco’s classroom, the students were frequently out of their seats and playing loud music, “[t]he room was filthy[,]” and the situation “was just out of control.” Hr’g Tr. 22:7-8, 22:24-23:3. Similarly, the school secretary testified that she had to respond to disorder in Belasco’s classroom “[e]very day”— “[s]ometimes three, four, five times a day.” Hr’g Tr. 37:2-10. She described the chaotic situation:

I would go into the classroom and those kids would be out of their seats, they would be all over the place. The classroom would be a mess. They would have thrown crayons, and pencils that have been broken, books, papers. Sometimes the chairs would be turned over. The kids would rearrange the classroom to suit themselves....
They would be drawing on the board, some would be working at the board. One little girl decided that she was the person who was going to run that classroom. She would make up lesson plans or lesson sheets for the kids to work on. She had decorated the bulletin board. Those kinds of things....
Sometimes they would be laying on the floor____ [S]ometimes they would be laying there reading, • sometimes they would be playing games, sometimes just laying there because nobody could make them stay in their seat.

Hr’g Tr. 37:13-38:24. The secretary expressed her opinion that some of the students “would be just mean [to Belasco] because they could.... I think they took advantage of her, some of the weaknesses that they perceived in her.” Hr’g Tr. 39:15-16, 40:4-6.

Around the same time, the District began to have other concerns about Belasco’s job performance. One of the District’s initiatives to improve students’ academic performance was the “Action 100” or “100 Book Challenge” reading program, which Belasco, like all teachers, was required to implement. Darlene Bushley, the District’s director of human resources, described Action 100 as “extremely critical” to the District’s educational mission. Hr’g Tr. 626:20-23, June 19, 2012, ECF No. 31-3. According to Woods-Wallace, imple- ■ menting Action 100 was one of the “essential functions” of every teacher’s job. Hr’g Tr. 175:20-176:1, May 24, 2012, ECF No. 31-1. Defendants believed that Belasco was not implementing the program as required and was failing to record students’ reading data properly in the school’s database. For example, Belasco acknowledges that she entered 60 steps of reading data for students after she had been absent for five days, but she claims that she had been instructed to do so. Belasco acknowledges that she entered false data into the system; she says, however, that she did not do so intentionally but only because she “didn’t know how to do it.” Hr’g Tr. 495:2-7, May 30, 2012, ECF No. 31-2. Belasco says that she “was absent quite often” from training sessions and in fact “[doesn’t] remember going to any sessions .,.. ” Hr’g Tr. 496:18-22.

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