Lawrence v. School District No. 1

FILED
United States Court of Appeals
Tenth Circuit
March 28, 2014
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Elisabeth A. Shumaker
Clerk of Court
TENTH CIRCUIT
JUANETTA LAWRENCE,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v. No. 13-1157
(D.C. No. 1:11-CV-02789-PAB-KMT)
SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1, IN THE (D. Colo.)
CITY AND COUNTY OF DENVER,
a/k/a Denver Public Schools; BOARD
OF EDUCATION OF SCHOOL
DISTRICT NO. 1, IN THE CITY
AND COUNTY OF DENVER, a/k/a
Denver Board of Education,
Defendants-Appellees.
ORDER AND JUDGMENT *
Before GORSUCH, MATHESON, and BACHARACH, Circuit Judges.
Juanetta Lawrence used to work as a social worker in the Denver public
school system. Each summer she’d receive her assignment for the coming school
year, but in the summer of 2009 she received an assignment she didn’t want. And
the assignment she did want went to a younger white woman whom Ms.
*
This order and judgment is not binding precedent except under the
doctrines of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel. It may be cited,
however, for its persuasive value consistent with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 and 10th
Cir. R. 32.1.
Lawrence, an African-American, thought less qualified. Ms. Lawrence proceeded
to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging
racial discrimination. But before that claim could be resolved she found herself
without any job at all.
The school district and board suspended and ultimately fired Ms. Lawrence
because, they said, of unsatisfactory job performance. To support their claim they
produced a number of negative reviews they had received about Ms. Lawrence’s
workplace conduct from a number of different schools, as well as an independent
arbitrator’s judgment. Convinced that all this was really retaliation for her
decision to file the EEOC complaint, Ms. Lawrence filed this lawsuit against the
Denver public school district and its school board. Besides various retaliation
claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1981, she brought other federal and state charges. But
at oral argument Ms. Lawrence made clear that the only question she wishes us to
decide is whether the district court erred in granting summary judgment to the
school district and board on her retaliation claims.
To survive summary judgment, Ms. Lawrence must begin by stating a
prima facie case, showing that (1) she engaged in protected activity, (2) the
school district or board took action that a reasonable employee would have found
materially adverse, and (3) there was a causal connection between her protected
activity and that adverse action. Carney v. City & Cnty. of Denver, 534 F.3d
1269, 1276 (10th Cir. 2008). At summary judgment the district court found that
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all of Ms. Lawrence’s retaliation theories in this case fail one or more of these
prima facie requirements. After an independent review of the record and law, we
find ourselves constrained to reach the same conclusion.
*
In her first retaliation claim Ms. Lawrence presses the argument that the
school district and board retaliated against her by giving her “significantly
different responsibilities for the 2009-2010 school year” and also by setting her
up “for failure” that year by forcing her to split her time at four different
locations. But whether or not these allegations successfully navigate the first two
requirements for a prima facie case, they clearly run aground on the third — the
requirement that the employee’s protected activity cause the materially adverse
action taken by the employer. Ms. Lawrence’s complaint makes clear she
received her 2009-2010 assignment before she filed her EEOC complaint. Indeed,
it was that very assignment and her displeasure with it that prompted Ms.
Lawrence’s EEOC complaint in the first place. According to Ms. Lawrence
herself, then, it was the unfavorable work assignment that caused her protected
activity, not the other way around. When confronted with this problem by
defendants, moreover, Ms. Lawrence has attempted no answer. For that reason,
we cannot see how the district court erred in granting the school district and
board summary judgment on this particular retaliation theory.
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*
Next, Ms. Lawrence claims unlawful retaliation because she was suspended
from her job — first with pay and later without — while her performance was
under review before her dismissal. The school district and board claim that this
suspension doesn’t qualify as a materially adverse action and so Ms. Lawrence
cannot satisfy the second requirement for a prima facie case. Cf. Joseph v.
Leavitt, 465 F.3d 87, 91 (2d Cir. 2006) (“[A]dministrative leave with pay during
the pendency of an investigation does not, without more, constitute an adverse
employment action.”). For her part, Ms. Lawrence insists that her suspension was
a materially adverse action, in part because it qualified under her union’s
collective bargaining agreement as “corrective action.” Cf. id. at 95 (Jacobs, J.,
concurring) (“Relief from job duties in anticipation of dismissal (with or without
pay) would seem to be an adverse development; and a substantial reduction in
duties and responsibilities can in itself be painful and humiliating for a productive
person.”).
We don’t have to resolve this disagreement because Ms. Lawrence
confronts another obstacle still. As Ms. Lawrence acknowledged at oral
argument, neither the school district nor the school board played any causal role
in her suspensions. Each time, she admits, the decision to suspend her was made
instead and entirely by her supervisor, Eldridge Greer, whom the school district
employed to manage its social workers. It was Dr. Greer, Ms. Lawrence
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contends, who wanted revenge for her EEOC complaint. Yet Ms. Lawrence’s
retaliation claims based on her suspensions don’t name Dr. Greer as a defendant.
So even if we assume for argument’s sake that Dr. Greer acted with retaliatory
animus as Ms. Lawrence urges us to do, he just simply isn’t in the case. Only the
school district and board employing him are, and they aren’t alleged to have been
involved in the action Ms. Lawrence contends was materially adverse to her.
Neither can the school district and board be held liable simply because they
employ Dr. Greer. In Monell v. Department of Social Services, the Supreme
Court expressly held that municipal defendants — public school districts and
school boards included — can’t be held liable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 solely
because they employ a person who violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights.
436 U.S. 658, 691 (1978); see also Seamons v. Snow, 206 F.3d 1021, 1029 (10th
Cir. 2000) (applying the Monell rule to a school district); Ware v. Unified Sch.
Dist. No. 492, 902 F.2d 815, 817 (10th Cir. 1990) (applying the Monell rule to a
school board). In this way, § 1983 “rejects the tort principle of respondeat
superior and does not subject municipalities to vicarious liability for the acts of
their employees.” Milligan-Hitt v. Bd. of Trs., 523 F.3d 1219, 1223 (10th Cir.
2008). Instead, a municipality and its “taxpayers are liable only for the
municipality’s own misdeeds.” Id. The same holds true when the plaintiff seeks
prospective relief rather than damages for past misconduct. L.A. Cnty. v.
Humphries, 131 S. Ct. 447, 452-54 (2010). And these principles apply to § 1981
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claims no less than § 1983 claims, because Congress designed § 1983 to supply
the remedies when state actors violate the civil rights protected by § 1981. See
Jett v. Dall. Indep. Sch. Dist., 491 U.S. 701, 734 (1989); Bolden v. City of
Topeka, 441 F.3d 1129, 1135 (10th Cir. 2006). So to hold the school district or
school board liable for her suspensions, Ms. Lawrence must do more than show
Dr. Greer was acting within the scope of his employment by the school district.
Ms. Lawrence might seek to satisfy Monell by showing that Dr. Greer’s
actions reflected an official school district policy or custom of retaliating against
those who attempt to protect federally protected civil rights. Or that his actions
were ratified by the school board. Or even that Dr. Greer himself is a final
policymaker for the school district. See Simmons v. Uintah Health Care Special
Dist., 506 F.3d 1281, 1284-85 (10th Cir. 2007).
The difficulty is Ms. Lawrence has not shown — and it seems cannot show
— any of these signs of municipal misdeed. Far from suggesting that Dr. Greer
was implementing the school district’s official policies, Ms. Lawrence contends
he flouted those policies when he suspended her — because he didn’t first afford
her a hearing and a chance to contest the criticisms of her job performance.
Neither does the record in this case give any indication that the school board
ratified or took any action at all with respect to Dr. Greer’s decision to suspend,
or that Dr. Greer was a final policymaker for the school district. Indeed, our
cases recognize that school boards, not lower-level administrators, are generally
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the final policymakers in public school districts because administrators are
usually constrained by board-established policies. See, e.g., Brammer-Hoelter v.
Twin Peaks Charter Acad., 602 F.3d 1175, 1190 (10th Cir. 2010). Given all this,
we see no way a reasonable jury might conclude that either the school district or
school board in this case is liable under Monell for Dr. Greer’s decisions to
suspend Ms. Lawrence, even assuming those suspensions qualified as materially
adverse. The district court was right to grant the defendants summary judgment
on these retaliation claims, too.
*
That leaves Ms. Lawrence’s claim that retaliation was behind the ultimate
decision to terminate her employment. And here at least there was clearly
adverse action caused by the school district and board, the defendants she has
chosen to sue: the school board voted to fire her, and everyone before us agrees
the board is the final decisionmaker for the school district. But a different sort of
causal problem lurks here. Ms. Lawrence does not allege that any members of the
school board voted against her because they wanted to retaliate for her EEOC
complaint. Instead, she alleges only that the school board unknowingly carried
out a retaliatory scheme hatched by Dr. Greer.
To be sure, when an employer is manipulated by a biased subordinate, the
employer itself might be held liable on a “cat’s paw” theory of discrimination —
so named in reference to a cat who, as fable tells it, injured his own paw while
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innocently doing another creature’s sinister bidding. On a cat’s paw theory of
liability the influence of the biased subordinate provides the causal connection the
plaintiff’s prima facie case requires, for even though the ultimate decisionmakers
weren’t biased it was still because of bias that the employee suffered the adverse
action. To bring a successful cat’s paw or subordinate bias claim in this case,
however, Ms. Lawrence bears the burden of showing both that retaliatory animus
motivated Dr. Greer to seek Ms. Lawrence’s termination and that his biased
actions were the proximate cause of the school board’s vote to terminate her.
Staub v. Proctor Hosp., 131 S. Ct. 1186, 1194 (2011); E.E.O.C. v. BCI Coca-Cola
Bottling Co. of L.A., 450 F.3d 476, 487 (10th Cir. 2006). And once more she has
to show that holding the school district and board liable under this cat’s paw
theory doesn’t run afoul of Monell’s teaching on municipal liability.
All that Ms. Lawrence has failed to do. Indeed, even if we assume Ms.
Lawrence’s cat’s paw claim comports with Monell, and even if we assume Dr.
Greer truly held her EEOC complaint against her — two premises themselves
open to question and only lightly discussed in the briefing before us — the record
in this case simply doesn’t permit the conclusion that Dr. Greer’s alleged bias
proximately caused her termination. Between Dr. Greer’s recommendation of Ms.
Lawrence’s dismissal and the school board’s vote the parties held an extensive
seven-day hearing on Ms. Lawrence’s work performance before an independent
and mutually chosen arbitrator. Ms. Lawrence participated and was represented
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by legal counsel. In total, the arbitrator considered testimony from more than
fifteen witnesses, many of whom detailed specific occasions on which Ms.
Lawrence had failed to perform her job satisfactorily. By way of example, for
three different students at two separate schools Ms. Lawrence reportedly devoted
inadequate effort to completing suicide risk assessments. At another school, Ms.
Lawrence was said to have done likewise after a student said “he was going to
bring a gun to school and shoot everyone.” Aplt. App. vol. 1, at 169. In the end,
the arbitrator concluded that Ms. Lawrence had been sufficiently neglectful of her
responsibilities and sufficiently insubordinate to warrant dismissal.
Under this court’s precedents, the arbitration process was enough to break
any chain of causation that otherwise might have connected Dr. Greer’s bias and
the school board’s vote. To be sure, an independent investigation and exercise of
judgment by an unbiased party don’t automatically break the chain of causation.
See Staub, 131 S. Ct. at 1193. That’s because the purportedly independent
judgment may still rely on “facts provided by the biased supervisor.” Id. But as
this court has explained, no such danger exists when the employer or an unbiased
third party “independently verifies the facts and does not rely on the biased
source.” Lobato v. N.M. Env’t Dep’t, 733 F.3d 1283, 1294 (10th Cir. 2013). In
this case, Ms. Lawrence has pointed us to nothing that indicates the arbitrator’s
factual findings relied on Dr. Greer’s input in any way, nor indeed have we found
any such indications in our own review of the record.
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Ms. Lawrence replies that Dr. Greer at least had a hand in setting the
agenda for the arbitration hearing. After all, it was his recommendation of Ms.
Lawrence’s dismissal that gave rise to the hearing. What’s more, the hearing’s
scope was limited to deciding whether the school district had just cause for firing
Ms. Lawrence as Dr. Greer had recommended. It isn’t as though the arbitrator
came up with the idea that Ms. Lawrence deserved termination on his own.
Neither did the school board, for that matter: it relied on the arbitrator’s report.
If what happened here was enough to break the causal chain, what prevents any
grudge-holding supervisor from setting into motion ostensibly independent fact-
finding, knowing full well that a bit of digging on anyone is sure to turn up some
workplace failing and quite possibly enough to prompt termination?
Whatever worries might arise along these lines in other cases, they aren’t
well placed in this one. The arbitrator put the burden of proof on the school
district throughout the hearing and was quite cautious about relying on isolated
performance complaints. Even so, he found many credible allegations against
Ms. Lawrence coming from many different individuals at many different schools:
of the ten schools at which Ms. Lawrence had worked during her time in the
school district, seven had expressed dissatisfaction with her work, often
“passionately.” Aplt. App. vol. 1, at 170. In the end the arbitrator reasoned that
“[w]hile it is possible some of these numerous complaints are the result or fault of
the complainant and not Ms. Lawrence, there is scant evidence of this being the
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case. The overwhelming evidence is that Ms. Lawrence is the precipitator of the
complaints.” Id. The arbitrator further identified several distinct reasons why
Ms. Lawrence’s termination was warranted, each of which he thought was enough
all on its own. Given this record and the law governing us, we simply see no way
to conclude that a reasonable jury could find Dr. Greer’s bias was the proximate
cause of the school board’s decision to terminate Ms. Lawrence’s employment.
Affirmed.
ENTERED FOR THE COURT
Neil M. Gorsuch
Circuit Judge
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