A Baltimore City teacher working on her master?s degree at McDaniel College has sued the Westminster school, alleging that it wrongfully dismissed her.
“This has all been too much,” said Rosalia Huggins, a second-grade teacher at Samuel Coleridge Elementary. “Education is all I have.”
Huggins is “entitled to have a judgment against McDaniel College because the negligence on their part has caused emotional suffering that continues to be a barrier and a distraction to everyday activities,” according to a lawsuit filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court and recently moved to Carroll County Circuit Court.
She seeks $40,000 in lost wages and an undetermined amount for emotional suffering, which caused her to lose her hair and seek counseling, said Huggins, a native of the Virgin Islands and the first person in her family to attend college.
For three years, Huggins said, she tried to explain to the college ? through phone calls, faxes and e-mails ? that the school failed to properly register her for the last class she needed to graduate.
When her name didn?t appear on the class roster, she couldn?t access class materials online, so she tried to withdraw, but instead, she says the school gave her an F and dismissed her from the program.
The college wouldn?t comment Monday on pending litigation, Joyce Muller, a McDaniel spokeswoman, said.
But “we take all students? complaints seriously,” she said.
Huggins said her problems at McDaniel started the first day she met with her adviser, who asked why she wanted to finish her degree at McDaniel ? a question raised, Huggins alleges, because she is black.
“As a teacher, I think education is for everybody,” she said. “How do you tell someone that you have been discriminated against?”
McDaniel?s dean of graduate and professional studies wrote Huggins to tell her she would be readmitted and her F replaced with a W for withdrawal, but Huggins said she is too upset to return.
“I am sorry that it has taken so much time and energy to resolve this problem and apologize for any distress and inconvenience it has caused you,” Dean Sherri Lind Hughes wrote. “I assure you that any errors on our part were unintentional.”
