She says she only found out she'd been let go when she called to ask about her job
A veteran school psychologist says the Los Angeles Unified School District secretly fired her after 23 years - and hid it for nearly two years.
The lawsuit, filed July 7, 2026 in federal court in Los Angeles, sets out allegations that map onto process points HR teams watch closely: how accommodation requests are handled, how leave is managed, and how a separation is documented and communicated.
The dispute started, according to the complaint, with a request for a religious exemption from the district's 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The filing says the district denied the request the same day she submitted it, without any interactive process - the individualized, back-and-forth discussion the law expects between an employer and an employee.
The complaint also alleges the outcome was set before any request was reviewed. It quotes a districtwide message to staff stating that "reasonable accommodations do not include permitting employees to continue working at a District facility without being fully vaccinated."
From there, the filing describes a series of actions taken while she was on approved medical leave for PTSD, which the complaint says followed her son's death: a disciplinary conference scheduled during that leave, a resignation form sent to her, her work laptop deactivated, and her medical insurance and a $350,000 life-insurance policy canceled without notice. She says the cancellations cost her about $5,000 out of pocket and roughly $650 a month for replacement coverage.
The episode HR readers may find most striking comes next. The plaintiff says she personally delivered her return-to-work form and watched a senior district administrator stamp and sign it as received on May 12, 2022. Months later, according to the complaint, that same administrator sent a letter stating that no return-to-work paperwork had been received and that the employee was absent without leave. The filing calls those statements false and alleges the letter set up her separation on July 1, 2023 - carried out, she says, with no notice and no hearing.
She alleges she learned of the firing only in April 2025, when she called a district personnel specialist to ask about her employment status.
The suit brings claims under Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and 42 U.S.C. § 1983, along with California Education Code provisions covering the dismissal of tenured teachers. The Section 1983 due-process count names the administrator in her individual capacity, not only the district. The plaintiff also points to Groff v. DeJoy, the 2023 US Supreme Court decision on religious-accommodation hardship, arguing the district cannot show the accommodation would have imposed any real cost.
There is an administrative wrinkle, too. The complaint is a protective filing prompted by a dispute over the plaintiff's EEOC charge, which she says the agency closed on the stated basis that she had filed a state-court lawsuit - a lawsuit the filing says never existed.
None of the allegations has been tested in court, and no judge has ruled on any of the claims.
