The Millcreek Township School District has been taken to court over another claim of discrimination during the tenure of former Superintendent Ian Roberts.
It is third discrimination claim brought against the district since Roberts announced his departure from Millcreek a year ago to head the public schools in Des Moines, Iowa. The district settled the other two cases for a total of more than $330,000.
In the latest case, a former top administrator at the Milllcreek School District, Timothy P. Stoops, is claiming he suffered sex discrimination when Roberts demoted him in the spring of 2023 with the approval of the Millcreek School Board. Stoops before his demotion had been the school district’s director of assessment and alternative learning.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Erie on Monday, Stoops, the plaintiff, is claiming he was discriminated against because the school district as part of the demotion passed him over for two principal positions in favor of two women.
The school district, the lone defendant in the case, “was motivated in selecting the two females for the positions, not Plaintiff, because of a bias against males in favor of females,” the suit claims. “This was sex discrimination.”
The suit claims that Stoops was more qualified than the two women who got the principal jobs based on his “education, experience and performance.”
Millcreek School District has paid $337,500 to end other claims
The two previous discrimination claims against the Millcreek School District settled for a total of $337,500. A payment of $250,000, approved in June 2023, went to Melody Ellington, who had been human resources director under Roberts and a payment of $87,500, approved in April, went to Joe Orlando, whom Roberts demoted from a top administrative post.
Both of those disputes were resolved at the administrative level, with Orlando’s case involving the filing of a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Stoop’s case is different. It has gone from a complaint docketed with the EEOC — where litigation is typically confidential and disclosures are sparse — to the filing of a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Erie, where the case is public.
The suit states that Stoops, 54, who had worked at the Millcreek School District since 1996, had previously been principal at the high school and middle school levels in the district — the two positions for which Stoops unsuccessfully applied after Roberts eliminated his administrative post, according to the lawsuit.
“Instead of placing Plaintiff in either of these principal positions,” the suit claims, the school district “placed two females who were less qualified than the Plaintiff for these positions.”
Ex-administrator claims discrimination was ‘willful’
Stoops and his lawyer, Joseph Chivers, of Pittsburgh, sued in federal court after Stoops filed complaints with the EEOC and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, according to the lawsuit.
Stoops is seeking compensatory and punitive damages in unspecified amounts. Punitive damages are warranted, the suit claims, because the school district’s “violations of the law were knowing and willful and with malicious intent.”
Though Roberts is not listed as a defendant in the suit, the suit names him as the person who told Stoops that his administrative job of director of assessment and alternative learning was being eliminated — a move that led Stoops to apply for the principal positions.
All of the other administrative changes cited in the seven-page lawsuit, including the hiring of the two female principals, also occurred while Roberts was in charge of the 6,500-student Millcreek School District. The School Board approved all the changes, according to district records.
No comment from Millcreek School District
The solicitor for the Millcreek School District, Tim Sennett, said the district would have not comment on the lawsuit. A spokesman for Des Moines Public Schools, the largest public school district in Iowa with more than 30,000 students, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Roberts.
Roberts started in Des Moines on July 1, after serving nearly three years at the Millcreek School District. He was sworn in as Millcreek’s superintendent on Aug. 12, 2020.
The Millcreek School District will get a chance to respond to the suit in court. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter.
Stoops’ lawsuit resembles case of ex-administrator Orlando
With its claim of sex discrimination, Stoops’ lawsuit is similar to the case of Joe Orlando, whose administrative post was like Stoops’. The district in April agreed to pay Orlando $87,500 to end the gender discrimination complaint he filed with the EEOC.
Like Stoops, Orlando —who had been the district’s director of elementary education — had his job eliminated, was passed over for two principal positions and was demoted in a staff restructuring under Roberts.
The Millcreek School District’s settlement agreement with Orlando does not detail his claims of discrimination, but based on Stoops’ lawsuit, Orlando would also have been passed over the two principal positions that went to two women. The settlement agreement states that Orlando “alleged that the District discriminated against him on the basis of gender.”
Orlando had been making $119,700 a year as the district’s director of elementary education. After Orlando failed to get hired as a principal, Roberts demoted him to a sixth-grade English teacher at J.S. Wilson Middle School with a salary of $80,279, according to court records. Orlando left the district for a job at Erie Insurance.
After Stoops failed to get hired as a principal, Roberts demoted him to an eighth-grade English teacher at J.S. Wilson, according to school district records. Stoops had been making $123,067 as director of assessment and alternative learning. He resigned from the district following his demotion, according to district records.
Millcreek paid out $250,000 in another claim
The other discrimination claim against the Millcreek School District came from Melody Ellington, who had worked as the district’s director of human resources from July 1, 2021, until she resigned effective Sept. 30, 2022.
On June 26, four days before Roberts’ final day at the Millcreek School District, the Millcreek School Board unanimously approved a $250,000 deal with her. The board at the meeting also unanimously approved the demotions of Orlando and Stoops.
Ellington never filed a lawsuit, but the $250,000 settlement resolved her claims that she was subjected to “unlawful treatment” at the school district and that the treatment left her no choice but to resign, according to the agreement in her case, which the Erie Times-News obtained under the Right-to-Know Law.
Roberts is the only school district official identified by name in the agreement, but still unclear is whether his name appeared because he was the subject of the claims or because he was in charge of the school district when Ellington made the claims.
Both the Ellington and Orlando settlement agreements included confidentiality clauses that prohibit school district officials and other parties in the cases from commenting. The school district admitted no fault in the Ellington and Orlando deals, according to the settlement agreements.
Budget cuts or administrative realignment?
In his lawsuit, Stoops challenges what he claims Roberts told him during the course of his demotion.
In mid-April 2023, according to the suit, Roberts told Stoops that his job as director of assessment and learning was being eliminated due to budget cuts. However, the suit claims, Stoops learned during a School Board meeting in May 2023 that his position was being eliminated due to a realignment of upper management positions rather than budget constraints.
Stoops, the suit claims, “was not offered any of the realigned positions or even told he could apply for one of them.”
The suit states that Stoops applied for the two principal positions, but was not offered either “because of his sex, male, and a preference for females.”
Roberts’ management realignment focused on the top three administrators in the school district’s curriculum department, according to court records. They were Orlando, Stoops and John Cavanagh, director of secondary education.
Roberts eliminated the positions of Orlando and Stoops and created the job of director of K-12 education, according to court records and school district records. Cavanagh filled the new post.
After Roberts left the Millcreek School District on June 30, the School Board named Cavanagh the new superintendent on July 17.
Contact Ed Palattella at [email protected] or 814-870-1813. Follow him on X @ETNpalattella.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Sex discrimination: Millcreek School District sued over a new claim
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