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Nature of Suit Code: 445
Nature of Suit: Americans with Disabilities Act - Employment
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Submitted May 6, 2016*

Decided June 2, 2016

Before

JOEL M. FLAUM, Circuit Judge

DANIEL A. MANION, Circuit Judge

ANN CLAIRE WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge

No. 15-1245

CHIQUITA NEWELL,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

ALDEN VILLAGE HEALTH

FACILITY FOR CHILDREN AND

YOUNG ADULTS,

Defendant-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District 

Court for the Northern District of Illinois, 

Eastern Division.

No. 12-cv-07185

Charles P. Kocoras,

Judge.

O R D E R

Chiquita Newell, a former employee of a long-term care facility, appeals the 

district court’s grant of summary judgment against her in this suit under the Americans 

with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 12101 to 12213, as well as the court’s denial of her

post-judgment motion to set aside that decision. The district court dismissed most of 

her claims at the pleading stage and later granted summary judgment for the defendant

 

* After examining the briefs and the record, we have concluded that oral 

argument is unnecessary. Thus the appeal is submitted on the briefs and the record.

See FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C).

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1

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on her remaining claims that it failed to reasonably accommodate her disability and that 

it terminated her because of the disability. We affirm.

Newell worked at Alden Village, a care facility for developmentally disabled 

children and young adults, as a habilitation specialist assisting residents with personal 

hygiene and activities of daily living. When she started in 2003, she signed a job 

description stating that the work “requires physical exertion more than half of the time 

with moderate to heavy physical effort commonly required . . . including handling or 

lifting residents.” 

Over a 10-month period in 2010 and 2011, Newell twice injured her wrist on the 

job while handling aggressive residents. After the second injury, Newell’s doctor 

submitted a work-restriction order instructing that her contact with residents be 

eliminated. To accommodate Newell, Alden Village assigned her to laundry duty. She 

worked in the facility’s laundry department from March 2011 until October 2011, when

a dispute over her absence from work led to her briefly being fired and then reinstated 

with back pay as an employee on light-duty status. 

Upon returning to work in December 2011, Newell was assigned not to laundry 

duties but to cleaning and organizing tasks and was asked to resume assisting

residents. She objected, pointing out that her work restriction was still in place and

prohibited such a reassignment, but was told that there was no work available that did 

not involve some form of interaction with residents. Newell proposed working only

with nonaggressive residents, but such an assignment still would violate the prohibition 

on resident contact, so the facility administrator told her to see her doctor about 

modifying the restriction. The doctor refused, and Newell was told not to return to 

work if she could not interact with residents (though at this time she was not formally 

terminated).

After receiving a right-to-sue letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity 

Commission, Newell filed a complaint under the ADA. In this complaint (which she 

later amended), Newell alleged that Alden Village (1) wrongfully fired her; (2) failed to 

promote her; (3) failed to reasonably accommodate her disability; (4) failed to stop 

harassment; (5) retaliated against her; and (6) fired her in retaliation under Illinois 

common law. The charge of discrimination on which the complaint was based alleged 

only that (1) Alden Village discriminated against her based on her disability and that (2) 

it failed to reasonably accommodate her. She attached to her amended complaint a 

letter from the EEOC, dated more than a year after the intake interview, acknowledging 

a clerical error on her initial charge-of-discrimination form: based on her intake

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questionnaire, the EEOC should have checked “discrimination based on retaliation” as 

well.

Two months later, the court dismissed all but two of Newell’s claims in her 

amended complaint—an ADA discriminatory-termination claim and an ADA failureto-accommodate claim. The claims of a hostile work environment and failure to 

promote, the court explained, had not been mentioned during the intake meeting with 

the EEOC and had not been included in the administrative charge of discrimination. As 

for the EEOC’s clerical error in omitting the retaliation charge, the court stated that 

Newell had signed the charge form despite the error and made no effort to amend the 

charge to include a retaliation charge during the 300-day period allotted to her to file a 

charge based on the alleged incident of retaliation.

Alden Village later moved for summary judgment on the two remaining claims. 

Newell twice was granted extensions to respond before asking the court to “stay 

summary judgment proceedings” and reconsider its order dismissing most of her 

claims and its denial of her request to amend her complaint a second time. At the next

hearing, the court told Newell that it would address only Alden Village’s motion for 

summary judgment and denied the motion to reconsider without addressing its merits.

The district court eventually granted Alden Village’s motion for summary 

judgment. The court determined that Newell could not establish the first prong of her 

prima facie case for either disparate treatment or a failure to accommodate under the 

ADA because she was not a “qualified person” under the ADA (in other words, she had 

not shown that she could perform her position’s essential functions, which included 

lifting and other physical contact with residents, with or without reasonable 

accommodation). And even if she were a qualified individual, she could not show that 

Alden Village failed to accommodate her because the accommodation Newell 

proposed—limiting her work to nonaggressive residents—would still violate the terms 

of her medical restriction prohibiting contact with residents and would require her to 

have a helper for physical tasks.

Newell moved for reconsideration under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59(e), 

arguing that the court had overlooked her argument that she was a qualified individual. 

The essential functions of the habilitation specialist position, she maintained, did not 

include lifting and handling residents. Some residents do not need to be lifted or 

handled, she said, because they are sufficiently high-functioning to understand and 

obey voice commands. The district court held a hearing on the motion, but denied

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reconsideration, explaining that in its original decision it had thoroughly considered the 

habilitation specialist’s job description and duties.

On appeal Newell challenges the district court’s summary denial of her first 

motion to reconsider. But the court’s denial was not summary. At a hearing on the 

motion, Judge Kocoras explained that he would not suspend ruling on the motion for 

summary judgment in order to reconsider his previous orders because he had already 

given Newell two extensions of time to respond. This ruling was within the court’s 

discretion, especially given the court’s obligation to control and manage its docket, 

see Easley v. Kirmsee, 382 F.3d 693, 698 (7th Cir. 2004), and its “authority to establish 

deadlines and . . . discretion to enforce them” under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 

6(b), Raymond v. Ameritech Corp., 442 F.3d 600, 605 (7th Cir. 2006).

Newell similarly argues that the court did not adequately explain its denial of

her motion to reconsider its grant of summary judgment. But the court held a hearing

on the motion and explained its reasoning on the record. Newell, the court noted, did 

not mention anything that had been overlooked. The court stated that it already had

rejected the argument, reiterated in her motion, that she could have been reasonably 

accommodated had she been assigned to only high-functioning, nonaggressive 

residents. There was no abuse of discretion here because “a Rule 59(e) motion is not to 

be used to ‘rehash’ previously rejected arguments.” Vesely v. Armslist LLC, 762 F.3d 661, 

666 (7th Cir. 2014).

To the extent that Newell challenges the merits of the summary judgment ruling, 

she takes issue with the district court’s conclusion that a reasonable jury could not find

that she is a “qualified individual” under the ADA. See EEOC v. AutoZone, Inc., 809 F.3d 

916, 919 (7th Cir. 2016); Rooney v. Koch Air, LLC, 410 F.3d 376, 380 (7th Cir. 2005). But the 

district court correctly concluded that she was not a “qualified individual” for purposes 

of the ADA because she could not “perform the essential functions of the employment 

position.” 42 U.S.C. § 12111(8). Newell cannot lift or handle residents, and these are 

tasks specified in Alden Village’s written job description, which is considered evidence 

of the job’s essential functions under the ADA, see id.; Feldman, 692 F.3d at 755. Nor 

would Newell’s proposed accommodation—working only with high-functioning, 

nonaggressive residents—be reasonable. That proposal would still violate her doctor’s 

restrictions (prohibiting any interaction or contact with residents), and an employer is 

not obligated to reassign an employee to a permanent light-duty position. See Gratzl v. 

Office of Chief Judges of 12th, 18th, 19th & 22nd Judicial Circuits, 601 F.3d 674, 680 (7th Cir. 

2010). 

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AFFIRMED.

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