Dive Brief:
- An Ohio school district didn’t violate federal law when it gave an art teacher with hearing and vision disabilities unpaid leave rather than paid sick leave to take a guide dog training, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined Wednesday (Tumbleson v. Lakota Local School District).
- Finding no violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act, the 6th Circuit determined the teacher could not point to any examples of nondisabled employees who were granted paid sick leave “even when the employee’s proposed absence did not qualify for that leave.” Further, it said, unpaid leave was a suitable reasonable accommodation, even if it was not her preferred one.
- The court also turned down the teacher’s assertion that the Family and Medical Leave Act required the school district to allow her to substitute accrued paid sick leave for unpaid FMLA leave.
Dive Insight:
According to court documents, the teacher had a rare, incurable genetic disease, Usher syndrome, which causes progressive hearing and vision loss. She needed a guide dog and was eventually matched with a dog and required to take a three-week training course.
Because her training was “medically related,” the teacher requested the use of 13 paid sick days. The executive director of HR approved the leave, but said that as paid sick leave could only be used for “personal illness, injury or exposure to contagious disease,” she would need to use a mix of paid personal days and unpaid leave as an ADA accommodation.
The teacher later sued, arguing the school district discriminated against her for her disability by not allowing her to take paid sick leave and by failing to accommodate her disability. But the court said she had no comparators for the former allegation, and that unpaid leave, while not the teacher’s preferred accommodation, was an acceptable alternative accommodation that the school district had the right to choose.
The teacher also argued the FMLA required the school to allow her to substitute her paid sick days for FMLA leave. But she would have had to show the district “normally provide[d]” this leave to those in her situation, and the guide-dog training did not fall under the district’s sick leave policy, according to the HR executive director.