Real World Impact: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently held that absent an undue hardship, an employer must provide a reasonable accommodation to a qualified, disabled employee regardless of whether the employee can perform her essential job functions without an accommodation. The court’s ruling in Tudor v. Whitehall Central School District changes our understanding of the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA’s) requirements regarding when a reasonable accommodation is necessary, at least in the Second Circuit (which covers Connecticut, New York, and Vermont).
Background on Tudor v. Whitehall Central School District
Angel Tudor, a high school math teacher working for approximately twenty years at Whitehall Central School District, brought a failure to accommodate claim pursuant to the ADA before the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York. Tudor is diagnosed with PTSD, which manifests as symptoms affecting Tudor’s neurological function, interfering with her ability to complete tasks, inducing a stutter, and causing severe nightmares.
After her symptoms escalated in 2008, Tudor received an accommodation allowing her to leave campus for a morning and afternoon fifteen-minute break during her prep periods. In 2016, Whitehall’s new administration prohibited teachers from leaving campus, even during prep periods. When Tudor advised the new administration of her longstanding accommodation, Whitehall advised Tudor it would not honor her prior accommodation. Tudor went out on FMLA, and when she returned in January 2017, Whitehall accommodated her requested breaks for the morning, but limited breaks in the afternoon to days on which a school librarian was available to watch Tudor’s students if she had a study hall. During the 2019-2020 school year, no librarian or other employee was available for coverage. Regardless, Tudor left campus unauthorized on ninety-one of the one hundred pre-pandemic school days. Tudor’s leaving was not authorized by Whitehall.
Tudor brought suit alleging Whitehall failed to accommodate her disability. During discovery, she acknowledged that she was able to “perform the essential functions of her job” without any accommodation. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Whitehall on this basis, holding “that an employee who can perform the essential functions of the job without an accommodation cannot, as a matter of law, sustain a claim for failure to accommodate.”
The Issues Before the Second Circuit
On appeal, the Second Circuit addressed whether Tudor’s “ability to perform the essential functions of her job, without a reasonable accommodation, was fatal to her failure-to-accommodate claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act.” The court acknowledged it has not always been consistent in this analysis. For example, in 2019, the Second Circuit articulated the standard as “with reasonable accommodation, plaintiff could perform the essential functions of the job at issue” in Natofsky v. City of New York. A year later, in Woolf v. Strada, the court, in contrast, articulated the standard as whether an employee “was otherwise qualified to perform the essential functions of his job, with or without reasonable accommodation.”
To clarify the law, the Second Circuit went back to the ADA’s plain text, which it found does not align with the district court’s interpretation. Specifically, the ADA defines a qualified individual as “an individual who, with or without reasonable accommodation, can perform the essential functions of the employment position that such individual holds or desires.” Additionally, the ADA prohibits discrimination based on a failure to reasonably accommodate “the known physical or mental limitations of a qualified individual” who is both disabled and an employee. Finally, the court stated that under a plain reading of the ADA, the only exception to providing an accommodation is the imposition of an undue hardship on the employer.
The Court’s Decision
The Second Circuit found that, absent an undue hardship, an employer must provide a reasonable accommodation to a qualified, disabled employee regardless of whether the employee can perform her essential job functions without an accommodation. The court held, “[i]n concluding that ‘with or without’ means with or without, we break no new ground.” The court then cited to decisions from other federal appeals courts reaching the same conclusion, including the First, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals. In joining its sister courts, the Second Circuit articulates a strict reading of the ADA which affects the prima facie showing of a failure to accommodate claim.
