Opinion ID: 4375386
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Discipline history

Text: Rogers was the subject of progressive discipline a number of times. She was given a Letter of Expectation in March 2008 related to her use of work time, and in April 2009 she received a Letter of Warning about inappropriate communication with her supervisor. She filed a grievance through her union related to the Letter of Warning, contending that the underlying issue was simply “a communications problem” between her and Walker. The grievance was still unresolved when Rogers was fired in 2013. In November 2011 Rogers was reprimanded in part because she “failed to follow specific instructions to not discuss” a disciplinary process “with anyone outside of [her] supervisory chain of command or union representation”; she had sent an email to the supervisor of another employee who had filed a complaint about her to document what she considered to be inappropriate behavior by that employee. Rogers was given another Letter of Warning in February 2012 because of her use of unscheduled leave and her failure to follow instructions, and she filed a grievance about this letter. In November 2012 and again in March 2013 she was suspended because of difficulties -5- 7340 completing her work, the first time for 5 days and the second for 15 days. Again, she grieved the suspensions through her union. During the second suspension, staff who were covering Rogers’s work discovered a large number of incomplete long-term care authorization requests in her office that had not been reported to her supervisors. In a later interview Rogers acknowledged that “[t]here were 153 all together,” and she explained she “could have finished them but [she] was not allowed to do the facilities’ share of the work.” She said that in the past she had “completed the facilities’ share of the work if they were more than a couple weeks behind in getting payment” and that she “viewed it as part of [her] job — to get long-term care authorization completed whether or not the information was provided by the long-term care facility or whether [she] called them to get the correct information from them.” This was contrary to established practice; Rogers had been instructed before that it was up to the providers to make necessary corrections to their paperwork. Rogers was fired on April 12, 2013 — the same day DHSS granted her request for accommodation related to her PTSD — following a contentious investigatory interview. Through her union she filed a grievance contesting the termination. In June 2013 the union settled all of the grievances, including the other four that were pending at the time of her termination: the union withdrew the grievances in exchange for DHSS’s agreement to pay Rogers $3,800 and remove a performance evaluation for 2011-12 from her records.