A former assistant principal at a Virginia elementary school has sued her former employer for allegedly maintaining a hostile work environment and subjecting her to racially charged harassment.
Emily Mais, a former employee at Agnor-Hurt Elementary School in Albemarle County, Virginia, filed a lawsuit against the school district Thursday, accusing it of maintaining a racially hostile work environment against her after she expressed reservations regarding a series of teacher development training programs that incorporated critical race theory.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday on Mais’s behalf by the conservative legal group the Alliance Defending Freedom and details how Mais eventually quit her job as assistant principal after the school district failed to intervene after school staff repeatedly berated and harassed her for weeks after she used the term “colored” instead of “people of color” during one of the teacher training programs, despite the fact that she repeatedly apologized, including immediately after using the term.
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The complaint details how in November 2020, the school district implemented a mandatory staff training to comply with an “anti-racism policy” that called for subjecting different groups to different treatment to achieve “equity.”
“Because [anti-racism] endorses treating people differently because of their race, promoting racial stereotypes, and teaching that certain racial groups are inherently good or bad, embracing it laid the foundation for a racially hostile work environment within the [district],” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit further says it was “suggested that anyone opposed to their policy was a ‘racist’ and should consider finding a different job.”
The training and subsequent programs throughout the spring of 2021 were not well-received by several school employees, who, according to the lawsuit, complained to Mais that the programs were contributing to a “racially hostile environment.”
“Schools should be treating students equally, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or religion, and teachers should be able to advocate for policies that protect students and object when they see policies that are not protecting students,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Kate Anderson told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
Anderson, who serves as director of ADF’s center for parental rights, said that the district’s policy was “telling teachers that you need to view your white students as racist” and that teachers were being told to teach, grade, and discipline their students “based on the color of their skin alone.”
In June 2021, Mais’s concerns about the trainings came to a head during a presentation on the racial diversity of the district’s hiring practices when she said it would be “useful” to review the racial breakdown of the candidates applying for district jobs to determine if the racial disparity of district employees was due to a low number of applications from candidates of color or if it was due to the district’s “selection process.”
It was in this exchange, the lawsuit says, that Mais accidentally used the term “colored,” a word often associated with Jim Crow segregation, rather than the less objectionable term “people of color.”
Despite her immediate apology, the filing says Mais was immediately subjected to “verbal abuse” from a black employee, who ignored her apology, and continued to harass her for months, including by calling her “that white, racist bitch.”
Another employee, a school guidance counselor, also repeatedly accused Mais of racism despite her apologies and specifically cited comments from the district assistant superintendent that “failing to speak out in the face of a racist incident was to be complicit in racism” as justification.
The treatment by school staff and lack of intervention from district officials, the filing says, ultimately led Mais to quit her job as assistant principal “for the sake of her physical and mental health.”
The lawsuit says Mais was suffering from “an inability to sleep, panic attacks, breaking out in hives, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, hyperventilating, headaches, nausea, depression, loss of appetite, and an inability to focus on daily activities” as a result of the continued harassment and the district’s unwillingness to intervene.
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While the district accepted her resignation, it also requested that she cite “another career opportunity” as the reason for her departure, to which Mais agreed out of fear it would affect her future career prospects.
“It was obvious to Ms. Mais that the [district] did not want families to know the real reason she was leaving,” the lawsuit said.
A spokesperson for Albemarle County Public Schools told the Washington Examiner it had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.