BENNINGTON — A former fourth-grade teacher is suing Molly Stark Elementary School, its school district, supervisory union, principal and superintendent over allegations of discrimination and wrongful discharge.Â
The complaint was filed Monday in Bennington Superior Court by Brattleboro-based attorney James Valente. It details events that began in Rosa Van Wie’s classroom during the 2019-20 school year.
There, she taught multiple students with “severe behavioral difficulties,” and asked for additional support from the school administration, the suit states. She then noticed that a school resource officer — a police officer assigned to the school — seemed to pay special attention to a Black student with behavioral troubles, according to the lawsuit.
She observed that the officer “did not give the same attention to the white students among the group of behaviorally challenging students in her class, even when they misbehaved in similar ways to the black student,” the complaint says.
Van Wie had recently taken part in a school-sponsored implicit bias training. She believed the officer, a member of the Bennington Police Department, was biased against her student, and addressed her concerns with him directly.
In March 2020, 19 days after she spoke with the officer and the day before the school closed to in-person learning because of Covid-19, Principal Donna Bazyk told Van Wie that the school would not renew her contract for the following year, according to the lawsuit.
Van Wie, who is multiracial, also routinely knelt for the Pledge of Allegiance, which the complaint suggests contributed to the nonrenewal of her contract. A performance review cited problems with her professionalism, an area she had previously been lauded for, it says.
The suit lists four facets of illegal behavior that allegedly contributed to Van Wie’s discharge.Â
Each of the counts was filed against all of the defendants, including the Southwest Vermont Union Elementary School District, Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union, Molly Stark Elementary School, Bazyk and school Superintendent James Culkeen.
The first count describes discrimination against Van Wie, who is multiracial — one of her parents is Black, and one is white. The complaint contends school officials ultimately ended her employment because she is a person of color.
The second count alleges that she was wrongfully discharged after she advocated for a student of color.
“It is against the public policy of the state of Vermont to constructively discharge a teacher for objecting to racial discrimination that the teacher reasonably believes has been perpetrated by that student’s school,” it says.
Her decision to kneel during the pledge is considered protected speech under the First Amendment, and terminating her employment on those grounds violates state and federal laws, the third and fourth counts say.
The complaint requests a jury trial, and Van Wie seeks “compensatory damages, reasonable attorney’s fees and costs, punitive damages, and such other and further relief as the court shall deem proper.”
Dick Franz, chair of the Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union Board, and Christopher Murphy, chair of the Southwest VT Union Elementary School District, both declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Neither Culkeen nor Bazyk responded to VTDigger’s requests for comment on Thursday and Friday.Â
19 days
Within the 19-day period between Wan Wie’s conversation with Austin and her meeting with Bazyk, the complaint alleges that Austin had a conversation with Bennington Police Chief Paul Doucette, who then spoke with Superintendent James Culkeen, “presumably to express his displeasure that plaintiff had raised the issue with Officer Austin,” according to the lawsuit.
(The complaint says Van Wie later learned that the school resource officer, Jared Austin, had been instructed to interact with students who had experienced negative interactions with police. The complaint maintains that, at the time, Van Wie had reason to believe that he was racially profiling her student.)
Culkeen then spoke with a supervisor at the Union of Vermont Educators, who relayed information from the conversation to Andrew LaBarge, Van Wie’s union representative, the complaint says.
During his conversation with the union supervisor, Culkeen allegedly criticized Van Wie “for objecting to Officer Austin’s racially discriminatory actions and for kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance.”
In an interview, Van Wie said she attended an international high school that didn’t practice saying the pledge each day. She said that, as a person who is not monotheistic, she feels uncomfortable saying the words “under God.”
While she answered students’ questions, Van Wie “never instructed or encouraged her students to kneel during the Pledge of Allegiance,” the complaint says. It also alleges that she had multiple conversations with the principal about her kneeling during the pledge, and that teachers were not expected to lead it for students.
A call to Doucette was not returned.
Final review
Van Wie’s final evaluation — dated March 24, the day she was informed her contract would be terminated, said she needed to improve in the area of “professional responsibilities,” according to the complaint, suggesting she “continues to demonstrate self-serving practices rather than those of the mission and vision of the school community and greater SVSU.”
One year earlier, she had received the highest possible rating in the same category, the complaint states, and her supervisors had glowing remarks about her professionalism.
Teachers undergo a two-year probationary period at Molly Stark Elementary, and during that time, their employment is at-will.
“The nonrenewal of a teaching contract is a significant disciplinary action that creates a record that is likely to cause adverse consequences for subsequent employment,” the complaint states. “It is more difficult to obtain another teaching position after a school has chosen not to renew a teaching contract.”
Van Wie was told that she should resign to avoid a nonrenewal-of-contract on her record. She obliged, but the nonrenewal still appeared, according to the lawsuit.
In an interview, Van Wie said she struggled to find other jobs after her contract was voided. When she reapplied for her teaching license, which expires every three years, she had to check a box that asked if she had ever had a contract nonrenewed. The Agency of Education emailed clarifying questions to her, and her attorney, who she had already retained, wrote a statement on her behalf.
“Then I just had to sit on it for three weeks, not knowing what they’d do,” she said. “I thought I was going to form an ulcer. I’m a person who’s pretty good at letting go of stress, but I threw up multiple mornings drinking my morning coffee.”
Her license was later renewed, and Van Wie has been hired for the coming school year at Barnet Elementary School.
Concerns at Molly Stark
Other teachers of color have raised concerns about their experiences at the school, the suit says.
“During the period of time that plaintiff worked at Molly Stark Elementary School, a non-white teacher resigned … due to the experience of working there as a person of color,” it says.
White teachers were not disciplined after acting inappropriately, according to the complaint. Against the recommendation of a mentor teacher, a white teacher’s contract was renewed after she forcefully grabbed a child with behavioral difficulties.
The suit refers to other free-speech incidents in which teachers were not penalized, including “a teacher’s advocacy for President Donald Trump, strident support for the Pledge of Allegiance, and support for the federal military and the Vermont National Guard. The school allowed teachers to wear military fatigues to school.”
Complaints in Bennington
The lawsuit is the latest in a chain of advocacy and legal actions related to race in the town and school systems.
Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union recently agreed to anti-racism measures after students at Mount Anthony Union High School were asked to role-play an interview between an undocumented immigrant and an immigration official.Â
In September, Mount Anthony Union School Board member Ed Letourneau was asked to resign after posting several racist remarks on social media. One, in response to a photo of a white person wearing a mask and gloves while standing in the ocean, said, “Must be a liberal. Where’s the eugenics movement when we need it.”
A report by the Human Rights Commission recently concluded that the police department and the town of Bennington discriminated against Kiah Morris and her family on the basis of her race. Morris, who is Black, formerly represented Bennington in the Vermont House of Representatives until racial harassment by a white supremacist prompted her resignation.
Another complaint, which the ACLU submitted to the Human Rights Commission in April, questioned whether the selectboard had discriminated against two residents by releasing their public information during a review of their complaints about the police department.
Van Wie said she hopes the school district will end the use of school resource officers. The complaint notes that Austin was instructed to interact with students who had “previously experienced police trauma,” without the knowledge or approval of teachers and parents.
The supervisory union spent $311,000 on its school police program during the 2019-20 school year, more than any other district in Vermont, according to a VTDigger analysis. Most of that money was allocated to elementary schools.
Mia Schultz, who lives in Bennington and is president of the Rutland Area NAACP, issued a statement that called for an end to police presence in schools, and said the suit is “yet another example of the retaliatory culture in the town of Bennington.”
“All of this is wholly indicative of the systemic abuse that historically marginalized populations constantly face in our schools, our town,” Schultz wrote.
Van Wie said if she is awarded any money in the case, she will apply it to scholarship funds for her marginalized students.
Murphy, the Southwest Vermont Union Elementary School District Board chair, said he believed the school board had not been served with the suit as of Friday afternoon and therefore had not filed a response.