In Celebration of the ADA

This blog is written in celebration of the ADA. I celebrate the ADA because it is a powerful document that has the potential to bring about big changes in the work force. I believe that my experiences are proof that the ADA can work and that eventually it will prove to be a very powerful weapon in the fight against employment disability discrimination. I further believe that the ADA has the potential of becoming a law that is in everybody’s interest.

My battle began in 1998 when I sued the New York City public schools in federal court for disability discrimination in employment. I had been hit by the polio virus in 1954 when I was an infant. Prior to the ADA, I had tried unsuccessfully to become regularly employed. But when my employers saw that I fell, they quickly let me go. Then the ADA was passed into law on July 26, 1990, and my life changed. On August 1, 1990, I moved across the country to Rochester, New York, and was hired to work as a day-to-day substitute teacher in the Rochester city public schools. The person who handled my job application stated that the law required her to hire me because I was qualified. My work experience led the state to assist me in getting teacher certified, and that is how I came to work for the New York City public schools as a high school teacher.

Imagine that you are in my situation. You have accumulated a student loan debt of over $24,000 in order to get teacher certified. You participate in an oral selection process that measures your professional knowledge to be a public school teacher in a large urban school district. Because of your score, you are provided a city license for a tenure-track position and placed on a list of qualified applicants who are randomly selected for job offers. After you are hired, you are required to complete a written medical examination. You are asked about past hospitalizations, medical, surgical, and trauma history. You had undergone several major surgeries as a child in order to make it easier for you to ambulate. You are not aware that your employer may be discriminating under the ADA by asking for such information. In fact, you could have brought a disparate impact discrimination class-action suit against your employer based on testimony provided you later in federal court. You fill out your portion of the form honestly, your doctor fills out his portion of the form, and you deliver it to the employer’s medical department.

Your supervisor provides you with a reasonable accommodation of one classroom and asks you to request permission for its continued use. You don’t know that this is unnecessary according to the employer’s own procedures. You file a written accommodation request personally with the employer’s medical department and provide documentary evidence of your history of a disability in order that the request will not be denied. What you don’t know is that your employer has a non-transparent and unwritten policy to terminate city licensees for medical reasons. So, without your knowledge, your status has been demoted and you are now a regular substitute teacher working in the same school at the same job. This provides you with less job protections. Had you known that this had occurred, you could have filed a disparate treatment class-action suit against your employer for violating the ADA’s provisions regarding medical examinations and inquiries. Your supervisor gives you a satisfactory evaluation for the semester, but you have lost seniority and are transferred to another school. You are told that the reason for your transfer is “budget considerations.”

At the new school, you are terminated at the conclusion of the school year for poor classroom management and ineffective instruction. You believe that your supervisors actually terminated you because you complained to your union and to the medical department about their disparate treatment of you and their failure to provide you with a reasonable accommodation. You file a discrimination charge with a federal agency. Several months later, you learn that your employer terminated your city license. You are under the mistaken impression that your license was illegally terminated after you filed a charge of disability discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The employer denies terminating your license in court, but its own administrative agents attest in documents that the license was terminated. The employer argues that the administrators are mistaken.

This is what happened to me. Because I could not find an attorney, I have been representing myself in the federal court in Brooklyn for nearly thirteen years. The judges were antagonistic, and at one point my trial judge accused me of wanting privileges because of my disability. Then in 2005 administrators (who were responsible for the adverse decisions regarding the termination of my license) made incriminating statements. After winning an appeal in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, I have asked the district court to certify my claims as a class-action suit whose members are potentially all teachers who must undergo a medical examination by my employer.

No doubt the employer will state that at least one of my claims (medical inquiry into past hospitalizations) was not filed within 300 days of the time that I learned of the practice and therefore is untimely. However, on May 24, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Lewis v. City of Chicago (case involving African-American firefighters) that in disparate impact discrimination claims the use of the discriminatory practice is relevant. The City of Chicago had argued that the relevant time period was when the plaintiffs first learned of the discriminatory practice.

Maryam (Maya) Ayazi
Elmhurst, New York