Teacher may pursue title VII claim for harassment by students. (News & Trends).

A special-education teacher's claim that students' taunts about his national origin--and the school administration's failure to remedy the situation--created a hostile work environment may move forward, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has ruled. (Peries v. New York City Bd. of Educ., No. 97-7109 (E.D.N.Y. Aug. 6, 2001).)

The claim is unusual, as neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the Second Circuit has recognized a right of teachers to be protected by their employers against harassment by students.

"The most relevant cases in the Title VII context are those in which an employee has been harassed by the customers of his employer," wrote Judge Allyne Ross, referring specifically to Quinn v. Green Tree Credit Corp. (159 F.3d 759 (2d Cir. 1998).) But the Second Circuit "has not even resolved conclusively the question of whether employers have any obligation at all to protect their employees from discriminatory harassment by nonemployees," she added.

The plaintiff in the New York case, Vincent Peries, filed suit in December 1997, claiming violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He alleged that school officials knew, or should have known, about students' harassment and failed to take appropriate remedial action.

Peries--who was born in Sri Lanka, educated in England, and emigrated to the United States in 1968--began teaching at Francis Lewis High School in Fresh Meadows, New York, in 1987. He alleged that beginning in the early 1990s, he faced a "steady barrage of insults and demeaning conduct from students based on [his] national origin and race."

In November 1992, for example, a student disparaged him for being Hindu and told him to go back to Sri Lanka. Peries claimed that the student's teacher did nothing to stop the taunts and that other students soon joined in.

When Peries asked an assistant principal to look into the matter, he was assured that it would be "handled expeditiously." But the harassment went unchecked, the teacher claimed. Students mimicked his accent, called him offensive names, and ridiculed the Hindu tradition of wearing a dot on the forehead as decoration and for religious ceremonies. They also left notes on his desk and chair with messages like "Hindu, go home. You don't belong here."

In addition, Peries alleged that he was "subjected to a rigorous and demeaning program of observation." He was evaluated eight times in a six-month period during the 1993-1994 school year and received an "unsatisfactory" rating, which he had never before received. He said that the harassment and poor evaluation led to depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

The defendants argued that school officials did all they could, but that they were limited by regulations regarding the disciplining of special-education students. They contended that Peries had submitted only a few complaints about many different students, but not enough complaints about any one student to merit taking serious action such as suspension. And they said that, as a teacher, Peries was the primary authority figure in a classroom and was therefore responsible for maintaining student discipline.

The court's opinion differed. "[A]s a general rule, school administrators and school board officials have disciplinary authority that exceeds that of a classroom teacher, such as the power to suspend students and take other actions not commonly carried out by individual classroom instructors," Ross wrote.

She referred to a 1999 Supreme Court ruling that a school board may be liable for failure to stop student-on-student sexual harassment if school officials are deliberately indifferent to it. (Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Educ., 526 U.S. 629 (1999).) Ross noted, "There are, of course, distinctions between student-on-student harassment and student-on-teacher harassment, the most important of which is that a victim-student has no disciplinary authority over the harassing student, while a victim-teacher wields at least nominal disciplinary authority."

Ross declined to grant the defendants' motion for summary judgment, stating she had found that the evidence "raises a legitimate possibility that the harassment ... was sufficiently severe and pervasive to ... create an abusive atmosphere."

She wrote, "The question of whether school officials took appropriate remedial action is a question of fact, not law. The jury's analysis of this question can include such issues as what disciplinary options are available short of suspension and what constitutes a proper division of disciplinary responsiblity between administrators and teachers." Trial was to begin October 1.