Man may sue upstate school district for sex discrimination arising from deficient sexual harassment investigation

The Court of Appeals has reinstated a lawsuit in which an agricultural educator was banished from providing seminars in certain public schools after a school district credited an allegation that he had sexually harassed a student during an agricultural presentation. This case provides some guidance on the principle that a public school may violate Title IX when it mishandles allegations like this.

The case is Schiebel v. Schoharie Central School District, issued on November 1. The plaintiff denies sexually harassing anyone. When plaintiff met with school administrators about the allegation, the meeting lasted less than a half-hour, during which time the Title IX coordinator was hostile and accusatory toward plaintiff, and the district determined that, since he admitted reaching around a student for cups and supplies during the presentation, plaintiff was guilty of touching a female student even if his actions were not intentional. The superintendent of schools sustained this adverse finding against plaintiff on the basis that plaintiff did not deny that he may have reached around the student during the presentation and that plaintiff had ample time prior to the meeting to consider the accuracy of the allegations against him.

The Court of Appeals (Walker, Nardini and Menashi) reverses the trial court's determination under Rule 12 that this is not a gender discrimination case. These are complex cases. If you are the victim of sexual harassment in the public schools, you can sue for sex discrimination if the school is deliberately indifferent to the allegations, or if the investigatory process is so irregular that the process was a sham. If you are accused of sexual harassment, such as in this case, the same principles apply. Here, plaintiff has a case based on the deliberate indifference and sham theories, as cases hold that a false accusation of male-female sexual harassment case predicate a Title IX claim. An objectively deficient investigation, or an inexplicable result, leading to discipline against the alleged harasser can also violate Title IX.

The process leading to plaintiffs discipline was so deficient, and the result was so dubious, as to permit the inference under Rule 12 that plaintiff was the victim of the school district's gender discrimination. He did not receive due process during the investigation, such as timely notice of the charges against him, an opportunity to review or to present evidence, or a neutral decisionmaker. The Court of Appeals finds that plaintiff did not admit to sexual harassment when he said he may have reached around a female student to access supplies, and the district "also invoked a tendentious definition of sexual harassment -- that a single, accidental, trivial contact qualifies as sexual harassment under the district's policy -- that suggests [the district] was not impartially applying district policy."