Opinion ID: 2771330
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Thomas Mifflin School

Text: Leslie Mason was Mifflin’s principal when SDP assigned Daniels to that school. On a parents’ night on or about September 9, 2009, Mason stated that some of the teachers were old enough to be grandparents. Daniels, who was the oldest teacher in the room, took offense to the remark and complained to Mason that she found the statement ageist and offensive. Daniels contends that, following this incident, Mason became antagonistic toward her. 4 In accordance with SDP procedures regarding new teachers at a school, Mason observed Daniels teach several times during her year at Mifflin. Following these observations, Mason evaluated Daniels negatively, an assessment that Daniels contends was unwarranted. For example, Mason gave Daniels a poor evaluation for not using technology, even though Daniels did not have a Smart Board in her classroom and did allow her students to use laptops when she considered their use to be appropriate. Mason also repeatedly commented on the “terrible” appearance of Daniels’s classroom, despite the circumstance that Daniels was one of just a few teachers not ordered to clean his or her classroom after an SDP walk-through inspection. The relationship between Daniels and Mason was strained further because Mason often sent another teacher, Christine Lokey, to provide Daniels teaching support, an assignment that, in Daniels’s view, interfered with her teaching regimen. Daniels did not ask for Lokey’s assistance, and Mason did not send Lokey to any other teacher’s classroom with the same frequency that she sent her to Daniels’s classroom. The strain was exacerbated when Daniels learned from a student that Mason had called the student to her office to ask about Daniels’s pedagogy. At the end of the 2009-10 school year, Mason reduced the number of budgeted middle-year teachers for the upcoming year from three to two, an action that required Daniels to go through another forced transfer process. Although SDP’s central office, rather than the local principal, decides which teachers to retain and which to transfer, Mason told two students that she “had written [Daniels] out of the budget and that [Daniels] wouldn’t be returning in September 2010.” App. at 124. Even though SDP had made the decision to transfer Daniels months earlier, it did 5 not notify Daniels of the decision until September 2, 2010. Consequently, Daniels was unable to participate in that summer’s site selection process. Daniels sent a letter dated September 6, 2010, to SDP’s human resources and labor directors, complaining about Mason’s treatment of her. In the letter, Daniels again complained about Mason’s comment from a year earlier regarding the age of certain of the school’s teachers. Daniels also complained that another Mifflin teacher told Daniels, “They call you old school.” Id. at 255. In the letter, Daniels further stated that Mason sent Lokey to her classroom “[a]lmost daily” and that this was not her practice with any other teacher. Id. at 254. Daniels raised the following additional matters in her letter: Mason sent other individuals to observe her; Mason herself observed Daniels’s teaching at least three times and gave her negative evaluations based on her use of technology and classroom appearance; Mason would not assist Daniels in disciplining her students; Mason called students to her office to ask them about Daniels’s pedagogy; and Mason had written Daniels out of Mifflin’s budget without notification to Daniels notwithstanding Daniels’s repeated request for information about her status for the upcoming year. Daniels concluded in her letter that she “experienced ageism, harassment, and a hostile environment continuously throughout the school year.” Id. at 255. The next day, September 7, 2010, Daniels met with Lissa Johnson, the deputy chief in SDP’s staffing office, to ascertain her teaching assignment for the upcoming year. Although Daniels and Johnson did not reach a conclusion during the meeting determining Daniels’s assignment for the upcoming year, SDP unilaterally assigned Daniels to teach at E.H. Vare Middle 6 School. However, Daniels did not learn of her assignment to Vare until September 14, a week after her meeting with Johnson. Consequently, Daniels did not attend Vare on September 8, 13, and 14, days on which she would have been at Vare if she had known of her assignment to that school. On September 13 or 14, Johnson directed Vare administrators to designate Daniels as on “unauthorized leave without pay” until she reported. Id. at 213, 215. The record indicates that Johnson learned of Daniels’s September 6 letter on September 16, when she received an e-mail from one of its recipients notifying Johnson that Daniels had complained that Mason had harassed her. Around October 28, 2010, after Daniels had started teaching at Vare, she filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (“PHRC”).1 In the complaint, Daniels asserted an age discrimination claim based on Mason’s comment at the parents’ night meeting and Mason’s frequent monitoring of her through Lokey and others, while younger teachers at Mifflin were not scrutinized similarly. Daniels also asserted a race discrimination claim based on her forced transfer from Mifflin and Mason’s failure to give her timely notice of the transfer. On December 30, 2010, Daniels amended her PHRC complaint to include an age discrimination claim based on the forced transfer.