Discrimination allegation dismissed, despite meeting basic criteria

An African American female worked as an at-will school secretary and registrar. She frequently submitted inaccurate reports and missed deadlines. She received additional training on these issues, but her performance did not improve. She was also absent for several days without telling her principal. Her employment was terminated and she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging race discrimination.

The employee’s complaint was dismissed. In order to establish discrimination, she was required to show that 1) she belonged to a protected class, 2) she was qualified for her position, 3) she suffered an adverse employment action, and 4) she was either replaced by someone outside of the protected class or was treated less favorably than similarly-situated employees outside of the protected class. In this case, the employee had been replaced with a Caucasian employee; therefore, she met all of these criteria. However, her employer was able to prove that it had a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for termination. The employee had performance problems that went back several years and caused delays in payroll processing, increased her co-workers’ workloads and resulted in parent complaints. The school was able to show that it terminated other Caucasian employees for similar reasons. The employee disagreed with the employer’s statements about her performance, but was unable to produce any tangible evidence of discrimination to overcome those allegations.