Sexual Harassment Roundup

Here are summaries of three recent decisions in Title IX sexual harassment cases from around the country.

As reported here, a federal judge will let the mother of a bullied middle school student continue to pursue her lawsuit against the Cypress-Fairbanks (Texas) Independent School District, having denied the district's motion to dismiss her claims under Title IX. The bullied student, Asher Brown, committed suicide in 2010 after enduring two years of bullying and harassment by his peers, who targeted Brown for his perceived sexual orientation among other reasons. Brown's Asperger's syndrome challenged his ability to interact socially with his peers. Additionally, Brown was small, not athletically inclined, talked with a lisp, and pigeon-toed -- a condition that caused him to walk with a "sashay." The court determined that the plaintiff sufficiently alleged that Brown was targeted because of sex, in that the bullies' perception of Brown's homosexuality was rooted in his gender nonconforming behavior, as evidenced by the gay slurs and other sexual behavior that they used to taunt him. The court also accepted plaintiff's allegations that the school district was on notice of the harassment, notwithstanding that the middle school principal did not know, because Brown and his parents complained regularly to counselors, teachers, and other school officials with authority to take corrective action. They further allege that in response to their complaints, no action was taken to address the bullies or protect Brown from further harassment. Barring settlement, a trial will take place likely next year. Brown v. Ogletree, 2012 WL 591190 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 21, 2012).

Another federal court dismissed Title IX claims against Blackburn College, in Illinois, stemming from the rape of a female student, the plaintiff, by an unknown attacker. According to the court, undisputed facts demonstrate that the college did not have actual notice of the threat. While agreeing with the majority of courts that the threat of harassment need not be "plaintiff-specific," the court nevertheless found insufficient basis to conclude that college was aware of a risk in this case, as prior instances of campus rape known to officials at the time of plaintiff's assault did not involve unknown attackers. Nor was Blackburn indifferent to sexual harassment after plaintiff reported the rape to college officials. College counselors met with the plaintiff on the night of the assault and many times thereafter, officials held a town hall meeting about campus safety, assisted her with off-campus resources, and offered academic accommodations. This response is not deliberate indifference as required for Title IX liability to attach. Doe v. Blackburn College, 2012 WL 640046 (C.D. Ill. Feb. 27, 2012).

A federal court dismissed Title IX and other claims against the District of Columbia arising out of a teacher's alleged sexual relationship with a high school student. According to the court, the student-plaintiff did not allege that she reported the relationship to anyone. Though her pregnancy was known, she did not report nor was anyone aware that the pregnancy resulted from a sexual relationship with a teacher. Once the District officials did receive report of the relationship, they investigated the matter and ultimately found the teacher not liable. According to the court, "In light of the breadth of this investigation and its inconclusive results, DCPS can hardly be said to have acted with deliberate indifference by not firing Weismiller [the teacher] then. Finally but significantly, Plaintiff does not allege that further sexual harassment occurred as a result of [DCPS's] deliberate indifference." Blue v. District of Columbia, 2012 WL 746400 (D.D.C. Mar. 8, 2012).

Dallas School District Takes Only Boys on Field Trip to the Movies

As reported here, the Dallas Independent School District is getting flack for its decision to take 5000 students, only boys, to the movies to see the film "Red Tails." Due to the high cost of such an outing -- $57,000 to rent buses and purchase tickets -- it wasn't feasible to include girls as well. So the school district's solution was to leave the girls behind, assuming, most likely, that girls would not be interested in a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen who fought in World War II.

If you're wondering, yes, this violates Title IX. As one expert put it:

"This sort of blatant gender discrimination is actually quite shocking in 2012."

Indeed. I hope the stakeholders in Dallas ISD are holding school district officials accountable for their poor judgment.

Sexual Harassment Roundup

Federal courts have recently issued several decisions in Title IX cases involving allegations of sexual harassment. I am grateful to Western New England law student Shiona Heru for helping me prepare these case summaries!

• The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s decision to dismiss a harassment case against a school district in Texas, calling it “petty squabble, masquerading as a civil rights matter.” Drawing a distinction between sexual harassment, which is covered by Title IX, and generic bullying, which is not, the court refused to consider incidents arising out of dispute between cheerleaders, in which one female student allegedly spanked the plaintiff’s butt, spread rumors that plaintiff was pregnant and had hickies, could not be viewed as harassment motivated by the victim’s sex. Also, in addressing the plaintiff’s claim that the school district’s failure to notify the Title IX coordinator constituted deliberate indifference, the court made it clear that ineffective responses to harassment do not establish deliberate indifference. Sanches v. Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School Dist., 2011 WL 2698975 (5th Cir. Jul 13, 2011).

• A federal court in Wisconsin rejected a school district’s attempt to dismiss a sexual harassment case involving a seventh grade student who is alleging that school officials failed to protect her from extensive verbal and physical abuse by four fellow classmates. The most egregious acts alleged included three consecutive attacks by two of the students who repeatedly hit the plaintiff with spiked track shoes resulting in the approximately 38 puncture wounds on the plaintiffs head, as well as an incident where two students beat her with a three-foot long tree limb which resulted in bleeding, lacerations, welts, bruising, emotional trauma, permanent scarring and severe bruising of several vertebrae. When the parents of the plaintiff requested that the plaintiff be permitted to attend another school, the school district refused and would not remove her harassers from her classes. The court considered these allegations, if proven true, to constitute deliberate indifference that could thereby subject the school district to liability under Title IX. Doe v. Galster, 2011 WL 2784159 (E.D. Wis. Jul 14, 2011).

• A federal court in California refused to dismiss a case filed by a high school student who alleged she had endured severe sexual harassment by a school counselor. Specifically, the plaintiff had alleged that the counselor’s behavior over the course of six months, which included sexually suggestive comments, inappropriate physical contact and unwarranted monitoring, rendered the district liable under Title IX and other law. Though the district court dismissed those portions of the plaintiff’s claim based on conduct that took place prior to the plaintiff’s notifying the school of the counselor’s conduct, it did accept that the plaintiff’s allegations of deliberate indifference were specific enough to withstand a motion to dismiss claims arising from conduct that occurred after the plaintiff notified officials. Lilah R. ex rel. Elena A. v. Smith, 2011 WL 2976805 (N.D. Cal., Jul. 22, 2011).

• A federal district court in New Jersey dismissed a sex discrimination and harassment case filed by a 22-year old male student against his undergraduate institution, the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The court found that the plaintiff’s selective enforcement claim, alleging that NJIT’s actions were motivated by gender, was flawed because he failed to demonstrate that his circumstance was sufficiently similar to a female student’s complaint where she reported a threatening comment made by the plaintiff. The court also dismissed the student’s sexual harassment under Title IX because his complaint did not include specific allegations that the institution had notice of the harassment he was facing from his peers, or that it responded to that harassment with deliberate indifference. Tafuto v. New Jersey Inst. of Technology, 2011 WL 3163240 (D.N.J., Jul. 26, 2011).

Column Questions Title IX's Absence from Cheerleader's First Amendment Case

There's a good column at WomensE-News.org on the Fifth Circuit's September decision dismissing a student's claims that the school district violated her First Amendment rights when officials ordered her to cheer for another student-athlete whom she had accused of raping her several months before. While the facts of this case certainly do call First Amendment issues into question, i.e., does the cheerleader have a right to refuse to cheer in symbolic protest of a particular athlete and his conduct, and was school officials' response retaliation against her for reporting a popular student-athlete for rape? (for analysis of those issues, see here), columnist Wendy Murphy rightly points out that Title IX should have been at the foreground of this case. The student's lawyer apparently did not allege, and thus the courts did not consider, whether school officials' response to her allegations of rape constituted deliberate indifference that should have rendered the district liable under Title IX. But Murphy believes this would have been an easy argument to win. Apparently, school officials were under the false impression that they were not obligated to get involved with the case as it proceeded in criminal court, even though courts have said that such deference to law enforcement constitutes deliberate indifference. Rather than take any steps to investigate or address the matter on its own, the school let the accused student continue to play sports until his criminal conviction. As for the accuser, she was not offered any protection or even sympathy, as evidenced by the instance in which she attempted to refuse to cheer at a game for the accused student by name, but was ordered by the superintendent and the principal to cheer or go home (she chose the latter). This too violates clear Title IX precedent in the area of peer harassment, as courts have said that it is inappropriate to separate the victim from the perpetrator rather than the other way around.

So why was Title IX, the obvious source of relief and liability in this case, ignored by the lawyers, the courts, and the media until now? Murphy blames our society's reductionist tendency to view Title IX as a law only about athletic opportunity and I think that certainly comes into play. But let's imagine that early efforts to exempt sports from Title IX had passed. Would the law be popular instead as an anti-harassment law? I'm not so sure. I think it might just not be popular at all. Culturally speaking, we have a tendency to downplay sexual violence and to disregard it as a form of sex discrimination. We'd be wringing our hands about the lack of awareness about Title IX's application to sexual violence whether or not the law also applied to sports.

Sadly, this case represents a missed opportunity, both to offer some relief to the plaintiff and to raise awareness about sexual violence and sex discrimination in schools. Sadder still, the cases that do invoke Title IX in the context of sexual harassment and sexual violence -- the vast majority of judicial decisions rendered under Title IX today, as a survey of this blog would quickly reveal -- are not sending the message to potential plaintiffs, to school districts, or lawyers on either side about the role of law in this area. (It does not help matters that to learn about sex discrimination in law school, you'd have to take a class with "Women" or "Gender" in the title, and the people who take those classes are not necessarily the ones who need to be enlightened.) For these reasons, I'm particularly glad Wendy Murphy posted about this case. One column in the blogosphere (now two) won't change the culture of ignorance, but if we all keep talking about school's responsibilities to protect students from sexual harassment and sexual violence, eventually the message will get through.

Texas volleyball player's case closed

High school volleyball player Mackenzie McCollum's complaint against her Texas school district has been dismissed. The Office of Civil Rights did not find sufficient evidence to suggest that the Fort Worth school disctrict employees violated Title IX when they limited McCollum's playing time after officials found out she was pregnant.
McCollum actually ended her time at the school in December and was apparently in labor when the news of the OCR investigation was made public.
The National Women's Law Center, which represented McCollum, was disappointed in the finding, believing that the school district did handle the situation poorly. But McCollum's lawyer, Lara Kauffman, was looking to the bright side of things by noting the attention this complaint received. It will make schools more aware of their legal (and ethical, I would add) obligations to pregnant students, she said.
McCollum could appeal OCR's ruling, but there is no indication that she will do so. Also, no lawsuit has been filed in this case.

Texas textbooks and Title IX

The recent changes to social studies curriculum in Texas will result in textbooks that talk about the "unintended consequences" of Title IX (and the Great Society, and affirmative action). The issue, of course, is that changes in Texas are likely to mean changes to textbooks used all over the country because of the large number of textbooks the state purchases. Textbook publishers have to go before the Texas Board of Education, which approved 100 amendments (including the above) to the social studies curriculum, to show them drafts of their textbooks.
I am sure there are many happy anti-IXers since the news about the Texas conservatives efforts at reeducation broke a couple of weeks ago.
The possible good news is that in this digital age, there is the possibility of textbook companies customizing textbooks. But this would require, at the least, diligence on the part of school committees and state education boards in examining the materials. No word on whether these customized texts would cost more.

ESPN Profiles Case of Pregnancy Discrimination in High School Sports

Via Womenstake (among other blogs) I learned that ESPN recently profiled a case of discrimination against a pregnant high school athlete in an episode of Outside the Lines. Mackenzie McCollum was a star setter on her high school volleyball team in Fort Worth, Texas, until. But when the school officials learned that Mackenzie is pregnant (from the parent of a teammate in whom Mackenzie had confided), they refused to let her play until she secured clearance from a doctor, citing a district policy. Her coach subsequently informed her team that she was pregnant, in violation of student privacy law. After Mackenzie produced a doctor's note clearing her to play, her coach was forced to let her back on the team, but he cut her playing time in half. Mackenzie and her mother believe that the district selectively applied the policy, and that the coach outed her reduced her playing time, in discrimination against her and in attempt to shame her because of her pregnancy.

Mackenzie's mother filed a complaint with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, charging the Fort Worth school district with violating Title IX. An investigation is now underway. Mackenzie is also represented by the National Center for Women's Rights, who via its Womenstake blog add to the story that Mackenzie's missed playing not only caused her emotional anguish, but reduced her opportunity to impress college recruiters and compete for scholarships. NWLC also points out that discrimination against pregnant students (not just athletes) is common, and few people realize that it is prohibited by Title IX. In fact, it seems to me that the only time there is public pressure to comply with this aspect of the law is when ESPN runs an OTL special on it!

Helpfully, the National Women's Law Center has a resource page with guidance for schools and students on how to accommodate, protect, and nurture students who are pregnant or parenting. The NCAA has also addressed the issue of pregnant student-athletes, and produced these additional resources found here.

Texas School District Under Investigation

The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District in Texas is currently being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights, which received allegations that that district has discriminated against female athletes by offering fewer opportunities and by providing girls teams with inferior facilities, specifically with regards to softball. According to this article, more girls' teams than boys' temas have mandatory cuts, and a recently survey revealed that among female nonathletes in the district, 65% cited lack of opportunity as the reason why they did not participate in sports. If the GCISD relies on prong three to demonstrate compliance (as most schools do), this evidence of unmet interest would certainly call that compliance into question.

Title IX Sex Abuse Trial Underway in Texas

A Title IX trial commenced today in the federal district court for the Western District of Texas. The plaintiff is a former student at Bowie High School in Austin. He is suing the high school, the Austin School District, and a former color guard instructor named James Johnston, alleging that during the 2003-04 school year, Johnston made "made offensive physical contact" with him at the school and other locations, and that school district officials failed to protect him from this risk of which they should have been aware. According to the Austin Statesman-American, the school district defends that it was not aware of the student's accusations. Thus, the focus of the trial should be one who within the district knew what about Johnston and when.

See also the Houston Chronicle's coverage here.