A Black schoolteacher in Ottumwa, Iowa, who alleged school officials failed to adequately discipline students who repeatedly called him the N-word, has won a $425,000 judgment against the district and two senior school leaders.
During the 2021-22 school year, students called plaintiff Robert Bender the N-word nearly every week while he taught a middle school class for students with behavioral disabilities, according to a lawsuit he filed in June 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa and obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
He alleged that the Ottumwa Community School District and senior school officials failed to take adequate steps to protect him from the abuse, while punishing the same students more harshly for cursing, physical violence, and other misconduct.
Bender sought $3 million in damages for alleged race-based harassment and discrimination, as well as retaliation in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act and Iowa law, against the school district, principal Jerry Miller, and assistant principal Dana Warnecke.
Bender began working for the district in July 2021 as a special education teacher and behavior instructor at Evans Middle School, where he also coached the junior varsity boys’ basketball team. He later became a special education teacher at Ottumwa High School.
Bender said that students subjected him to racially motivated abuse and harassment from the time he started working for the school district, according to his complaint.
In early September 2021, a student referred to him using the N-word. The lawsuit alleged that while several of his co-workers witnessed the incident, they did not challenge the student’s behavior.
Two weeks later, another student repeatedly called him the N-word in front of colleagues who did not intervene. According to the lawsuit, Bender reported the incidents to Miller and Warnecke, who suspended the student for either a half or full day.
Over the next three months, several students routinely called Bender the same racial slur in front of other district employees, administrators, and students, according to the lawsuit.
During that time, Bender said he also received sticky notes with racist messages written on them. He reported the conduct to Miller and Warnecke and eventually to the district’s executive director of human resources, David Harper, who assured him the district would not tolerate such behavior.
“Unfortunately, the lack of discipline emboldened the students, and they continued to refer to Mr. Bender as a N-word in front of staff and administration,” the lawsuit claimed.
One repeat offender eventually received a timeout for using the slur, but the student continued directing it at Bender throughout the timeout because Bender had to supervise him.
During his first school year, Bender, who had support from two classroom aides, physically restrained a student more than three times after the child acted out against other students and adults. He also wrote up students for using profanity.
In March 2022, Miller allegedly reassigned Bender from a “behavioral teacher” to an “inclusion teacher” at the middle school for the 2022-23 school year. The lawsuit claims the reassignment was because Bender had allowed a student to walk out of his class — a common occurrence in the district.
The defendants later argued in a brief that the student’s departure was only one factor in Bender’s reassignment. In a deposition, Miller said that, as a special education inclusion teacher, Bender would regularly “go into different classrooms where he would work with different teachers and could pick up different strategies for classroom management,” rather than remain in the “isolated” BD (behavior disorder) classroom.
Later in March 2022, a sixth-grade student used the N-word toward Bender at a bus stop in front of staff and parents. The next day, the student used the slur again in front of Miller. Although Bender wrote up the student, school officials did not remove him from class or, to Bender’s knowledge, discipline him, according to the lawsuit.
In his deposition, Miller said he heard the student direct the racial slur at Bender but thought the situation was best handled “by getting the child away from school, and the bus took him home, because it was at the end of the day and with BD students each day is a fresh start instead of carrying over what happened the day before.”
A week later, on March 29, 2022, school officials suspended a student for cursing at Miller and other staff members in Bender’s class, including using the N-word and another vulgar term.
At the end of the school year, the district offered Bender the option to move to any available position for the 2022-23 school year. He applied for and secured a special education teaching position at Ottumwa High School, where he remains employed as a co-teacher alongside a math teacher.
In its pleadings, the school district noted that Bender, who had implied the transfer was in retaliation for his complaints of racial harassment, had asked for the transfer to the high school and was approved by the district because “the position would not involve working with students with the same level of complex behavioral needs as those at Evans Middle School.”
Earlier this year, Bender stipulated that he would drop his claims of race discrimination and retaliation, which the court dismissed in June, and instead focus at trial on his hostile work environment claims.
He sought compensatory damages for past and future mental and emotional harm and anguish, against the district, Miller, and Warnecke, and punitive damages against the two school administrators.
The pleadings made clear that school officials and Bender had a fundamental disagreement over how much punishment to dole out to students with behavioral disorders, especially when it concerned racial harassment of teachers.
In their April motion for summary judgment, the defendants asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that teaching middle school students with behavioral disorders is one of the toughest assignments a teacher can take on and that Bender, an experienced special education teacher, knew that when he accepted the job.
Bender “accepted the assignment at Ottumwa Community School District with the knowledge that his students would be challenging, would act out, and would use offensive and triggering language, including racial slurs,” the motion argued. Then he “disagreed with the district’s responses when the children acted out — whether with physical aggression, harsh words or racial slurs — and believed the children should have received more severe punishments, specifically more suspensions of students.”
The district’s administration had a different approach, the defendants argued. Instead of automatic suspensions, they tried positive behavioral supports for those students, consistent with the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a federal law that emphasizes making efforts to keep students with behavioral disorders in school.
After Bender complained about students’ use of racial slurs, the district did not fail to act, the motion said. Instead, it provided coaching, character education and instructional support for the distressed teacher and, at times, removed students from his classroom and imposed disciplinary measures, including in-school and out-of-school suspensions.
The district also pointed out that some students with behavioral disorders directed the same racial slurs at white employees, countering Bender’s allegation that he experienced objectively severe or pervasive harassment.
Miller, the principal, testified that students had directed racial slurs at him, but he usually did not respond because he understood the students were “worked up” and “trying to get under [his] skin.” He said he would “wait to have a conversation with those students until things de-escalated.”
Another time, Miller heard a student direct a racial slur at Bender, the principal said he responded, “by staying in the timeout room with that child for a couple of hours.”
But Bender argued that the school did not apply its lenient disciplinary approach equally or consistently. He provided a tally of disciplinary actions against the seven students in his class, showing that some received less severe punishment, or none at all, for using the N-word than they did for other misconduct.
A student who used the N-word “all the time,” including toward Bender, received out-of-school suspensions for fighting, profanity, running in the halls, defiance, disrespect, insubordination, and truancy. However, the student’s disciplinary records do not mention his use of the N-word, despite multiple write-ups from Bender.
Paving the way for the trial, U.S. District Judge Stephen H. Locher rejected the district’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit.
In a June order, Locher wrote that a jury could reasonably find school officials treated racial slurs far less strictly than minor infractions — creating a culture where a “hostile work environment” was allowed “to develop and persist.”
After four days of testimony last month, a jury reached that conclusion. Following five and a half hours of deliberation, jurors found that Bender had proved his case against the district, Miller, and Warnecke, and awarded him $425,000 in compensatory damages.
The jurors further assessed $100 in punitive damages against each of the two school officials.
Last week, Judge Locher vacated the $100 punitive awards against Miller and Warnecke, ruling that the evidence failed to prove they acted with malice or reckless indifference toward Bender, leaving the $425,000 judgment intact.