6th Circuit Rejects ADA Claim from Poor Performing State Employee

In a published (and therefore binding precedent) decision issued today, the Sixth Circuit upheld the poor performance-based firing of an individual with a disability by Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.  The interesting thing about the decision is that the employee (named Whitfield) blamed some, but not all, of her performance issues on her disability and the Department's failure to "successfully" accommodate them.  The court rejected this approach saying:

Although Whitfield attributes her spelling errors to a lack of spell check in the computer program used to input complaints, she made serious spelling and grammatical errors even in programs that had a spell-check feature. In December 2007, nearly three months into her employment, Whitfield neglected to enter the required county on numerous inspection forms and, on another form, entered the wrong county. And although she had difficulties using her computer due to her disability, she also made errors in assignments that were not performed on a computer, such as organizing files alphabetically. On other occasions, she mailed letters without zip codes or complete addresses. Many of Whitfield’s errors can be attributed to nothing more than  Whitfield’s lack of attention to detail, and Whitfield admitted as much in her deposition, stating that she “just wasn’t looking that close” when addressing mailings. At bottom, Whitfield routinely made serious errors that were unrelated to her disability or to a lack of accommodations.
In this context, Whitfield must do more than point to the facts that Defendants knew she was disabled and failed to provide all of her requested accommodations. Although these facts may help Whitfield establish her prima facie case of discrimination under the ADA, in order to survive Defendants’ motion for summary judgment, she needs to show that Defendants’ explanation for her termination could be deemed pretextual. Whitfield focuses only on the problems she had entering complaints into the computer, arguing that, if she had been given all the accommodations she requested, she would have not had the same problems, and, further, other employees made similar errors or were not required to enter complaints at all. Appellant’s Br. at 18–21. Although Whitfield succeeds in creating a genuine issue as to whether she could have adequately performed that particular function with the proper accommodations, she does not address the serious errors she routinely made while performing tasks that were not at all impacted by her disabilities, such as confirming that an envelope has a zip code before dropping it in the mail. Because Whitfield does not create a genuine issue of material fact as to whether she was fired due to her disability, summary judgment in Defendants’ favor was proper.

The holding let the court avoid addressing whether the Department had failed to reasonably accommodate the employee.  The Department had made several attempts to accommodate her but there were technological limitations that the IT employees could not overcome relating to placement of her monitor and the use of a one-handed  keyboard.

Employers must still make reasonable accommodations, of course, but this decision provides reassurance that an employer may terminate a disabled employee for poor performance, especially where the performance issues are not caused by the disability.  Terminations for performance issues that are caused by a disability require more thought but even the EEOC acknowledges that employees with a disability may be held to the same performance standards as other employees so long as the employee is provided the reasonable accommodations "required to assist an employee in meeting a specific production standard."

Another aspect of the decision is worth mentioning.  The court expressly rejected the employee's argument that all she needed to do to get to a jury was to establish a prima facie case.  Given it is very easy to establish a prima facie case, that provides employer with greater security when dealing with employee performance problems.