North Plainfield School To Pay $35K To Worker Fired After Surgery

NORTH PLAINFIELD, NJ — North Plainfield public school district must pay a former employee $35,000 for firing her after having gallbladder surgery, Attorney General Christopher S. Porrino announced.

This settlement will resolve allegations the district engaged in disability-based discrimination by firing the worker for “job abandonment” after she missed the last three weeks of a school year following the surgery, Porrino said.

The school must also update its policies and procedures concerning worker requests for medical leave. The district also must provide training on those updated policies and procedures for all supervisors, managers and employees who receive such requests, as part of the settlement agreement.

“This is an important settlement, one that addresses a significant issue for countless New Jersey residents who have jobs and, unfortunately, might one day find themselves dealing with a medical problem or disability that causes them to be out of work for a substantial period of time,” said Porrino. “In this case, a longtime employee whose prior 13 years of service included no attendance issues got sick, had surgery, provided her employer with written medical authorization for her extended absence, and nonetheless lost her job. The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD) was designed to protect workers from this very kind of treatment.”

The worker only identified as M.G. to protect her medical privacy was hired in 2000 by the North Plainfield school district to work part-time as a paraprofessional.

It wasn't until the 2013-14 school year when M.G., who worked at the district’s East End Elementary School as a one-on-one instructional aide for a second-grade student, began to experience health problems.

On June 4, 201, M.G. underwent surgery, a day after telling her supervisor’s secretary that she needed an operation and would miss the rest of the school year, and being advised by the secretary to submit a doctor’s note.

M.G. did get a doctor’s note saying the surgery would require her to remain out of work for as long as four weeks. The note was dated June 5, 2014.

The district claimed they never received the original physician’s note and these was a lot back-and-forth regarding the note and sick time.

On June 17, 2014, the district sent a letter from then-North Plainfield Superintendent Marilyn Birnbaum, advising M.G. that her employment contract would not be renewed for the following school year.

In addition to allegedly telling M.G. she had “abandoned” her position, the letter also noted that M.G. was inputting her days off on a day-to-day basis, which made it difficult for the district to assign the same substitute each day to cover M.G.’s instructional aide duties.

In response, M.G. asked the district to reconsider her termination and had her husband hand deliver a note from her doctor. She also claimed she was not trained on how to input her absences into the computer other than one day at a time.

In her response, the Superintendent told M.G. that she would be paid after all for the sick time she took between June 2 and June 19. However, Birnbaum’s letter made no mention of M.G.’s request for reconsideration of the decision not to rehire her.

M.G. then told Division on Civil Rights investigators that she’d provided the district with a Disability Certificate from her doctor dated July 11, 2014 stating that she’d undergone surgery on June 4, 2014 and would be able to return to work without limitations as of July 14, 2014.

“The fact that providing a reasonable accommodation to a worker with a disability may involve some effort, or even difficulty, does not absolve the employer from its legal obligation to do so,” said Division Director Craig T. Sashihara. “Under the law, employers must engage in an interactive process to determine if a reasonable accommodation can be put into place, and we will make every effort to ensure that private and public employers across the State follow the law.”

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