Teacher's Case Against School District's Naming Policy Moves Forward
An Indiana High School adopted a policy that required teachers to call students by their first names as they appeared in the school's database. For transgender students who had changed their first names, the database listed their new names. A teacher in the school objected to the school's name policy on religious grounds and requested an accommodation, which the school initially granted, which allowed him to call students by their last names. After a year, some students and teachers complained about the teacher's practice, and the school rescinded the accommodation, informing the teacher that he would face termination if he didn't call students by their first names. The teacher sued the school, claiming it failed to accommodate his religion. The district court ruled in the school's favor, and the teacher appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Title VII prohibits an employer from discriminating against an employee on the basis of the employee's religious practices or beliefs unless the employer can establish that it is unable to reasonably accommodate the employee's religious practices or believes without undue hardship on the employer's business. To establish a Title VII case, the employee has to establish that his religious belief is "sincerely held." Then, the burden shifts to the employer to show that any reasonable accommodation would result in undue hardship. The U.S. Supreme Court recently considered that second part of the analysis (undue hardship) and held that the employer must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in "substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business." This new Supreme Court standard is more "rigorous" than the previous standard that defined "undue hardship" as anything that required an employer to bear more than a de minimis cost to accommodate an employee.
Applying the Supreme Court's new "undue burden" test to the school district, the Seventh Circuit reversed the district court's ruling, finding that the school district failed to introduce evidence that an accommodation to allow a teacher to call students by their last name resulted in the type of objective harm necessary to establish an "undue burden." The Court also rejected the school's argument that the accommodation caused a serious disruption to the learning environment. In short, the Court determined that there was a material factual dispute as to whether an accommodation would result in an undue hardship to the school, and remanded the case back to the district court for further proceedings. Kluge v. Brownsburg Community School Corporation.
The dissenting opinion would have upheld the district court's ruling in favor of the student. The dissent noted that the school had initially accommodated the teacher, but after a year, determined that the accommodation had failed in practice, and the school had an obligation to the transgender students harmed by the accommodation. The dissent argued that the school did not discriminate against the teacher based on his religion, and had reasonably concluded that its initial accommodation was not justifiable.
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