A former employee is suing The Greenwood School in Putney for allegedly permitting sexual harassment and discrimination and breaching an implied contract.
The trial date has been set for March 1, 2026.
A former administrative assistant for The Greenwood School alleged that the school’s administration failed to adequately address recurrent sexual harassment that she experienced from a student, according to the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court of Vermont by attorney Theodore Kramer in June 2024.
The employee resigned from her post at The Greenwood School — a specialized boarding and day school, serving neurodivergent students from grades 6 to 12 — in January 2024 due to the “sexually hostile environment.”
The complaint describes a student repeatedly “inappropriately touching” the former employee as well as making comments, facial expressions and engaging in “other acts of a sexual nature” directed at the former employee between May and November 2023.
When the former employee reported the first incident, in which the student pulled her toward him and touched her buttocks, the dean of students said that the student had “‘mommy issues’ and was looking for a connection,” the complaint states.
The complaint goes on to describe several times when the student touched her breasts, buttocks and other parts of her body despite the former employee asking the student to stop, and after she reported the instances to the administration.
The former assistant “specifically recalls the head of school telling her to ‘get over it’ and ‘nothing is ever solved by worrying about what has already happened’” after she wrote a letter to the administration about her concerns in November 2023, according to the complaint.
The administration and faculty at the Greenwood School were allegedly aware that the student had a pattern of “inappropriately touching faculty members, students and parents of students,” according to the complaint.
The student was barred from the administrative building by the head of the middle school in September 2023 after the student engaged in “continued sexual assaults and harassment,” the complaint states.
The former employee continued to bring her concerns to administrators after harassment occurred, but the school “took no action to investigate or correct the hostile work environment,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit argues that the alleged hostile work environment interfered with the former employee’s ability to execute her work duties, negatively impacted her mental and physical wellbeing and led to her resignation.
The complaint also asserts the school breached an implied contract established in the school handbook by “failing to uphold policies and procedures” and not safeguarding the former administrative assistant from the “many examples of harassment” that occured during her employment.
The former employee is seeking redress in the form of monetary compensation and attorneys fees as well as any “further relief the Court deems proper” during the trial scheduled for next year. The Greenwood School Head of School did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The attorney for the former employee declined to comment while the case is pending in court.
