Background
Sara Dobbins worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture beginning in 2006. Around 2019, while enduring an abusive marriage, she developed depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Her then-supervisor accommodated her with flexible leave and ad hoc telework. After he retired, a new supervisor, Charles Parr, took over in 2021 and noticed chronic tardiness and absences. Dobbins contended Parr was hostile — berating her, limiting her leave, revoking her flexible start time, discussing her mental health in front of co-workers, and attempting to dissuade her from filing an EEOC complaint.
The undisputed record showed more than thirty “absent without leave” infractions over four months. USDA suspended Dobbins without pay for one week in January 2022, and after she stopped reporting to work entirely in May 2022, it issued a notice of proposed removal in July, placed her on paid administrative investigative leave in September, and formally terminated her in January 2023. Her EEOC complaint alleged disparate-treatment discrimination related to the proposed-removal notice and the administrative leave placement; the EEOC found no actionable harassment or discrimination. Dobbins then sued under Title VII and the Rehabilitation Act for disparate treatment, hostile work environment, failure to accommodate, and retaliation, as well as a “wrongful discharge” claim.
The magistrate judge, presiding by consent under 28 U.S.C. § 636(c), granted USDA’s motion for summary judgment on all claims. Dobbins appealed to the Eighth Circuit.
The Court’s Holding
The Eighth Circuit affirmed on all grounds. On the disability discrimination claim, the court found Dobbins lacked direct evidence of discrimination: Parr’s “little girl” comment and instruction to “leave home issues at the door” had no connection to her disability, and his discussions of her health condition or angry reactions to her absences did not clearly point to an illegal discriminatory motive. Under the McDonnell-Douglas indirect-evidence framework, assuming a prima facie case, the court held she failed to show that USDA’s reason — chronic unexcused absences — was pretextual. Her proposed comparator was not similarly situated because that employee had no equivalent absenteeism history, and Dobbins’s own admissions showed some absences were unrelated to her disability and that her medical absences were recorded as infractions only when she failed to follow USDA’s own procedures.
The hostile work environment claim failed because most of Parr’s conduct was linked to Dobbins’s tardiness rather than to her disability, and the remaining conduct — requesting medical information in specific formats or mentioning her condition to a co-worker — was at most rude, not severe or pervasive. The sex-discrimination and disability-retaliation claims were waived because Dobbins did not oppose summary judgment on them in the district court, and the failure-to-accommodate claim was barred for failure to exhaust: her EEOC charge alleged only two discrete acts of disparate treatment and did not encompass Parr’s alleged failure to accommodate beginning in 2021.
The court also rejected the “wrongful discharge” claim, finding it either an unpleaded state-law theory, an impermissible free-standing constructive-discharge claim, or redundant of the already-rejected disparate-treatment theory.
Key Takeaways
- Terminating a federal employee for attendance violations — even when some absences stem from a disability — does not constitute disability discrimination if the employee fails to follow the employer’s own attendance and documentation procedures.
- A failure-to-accommodate claim under the Rehabilitation Act is a legally distinct theory that must be independently exhausted at the EEOC; a general charge of disability discrimination does not automatically encompass it.
- Arguments not raised in opposition to a motion for summary judgment in the district court are forfeited and will not be considered on appeal, even if argued on the merits in the appellate brief.
- To show pretext through a comparator, the comparator must be similarly situated “in all relevant respects,” including having engaged in the same type and volume of misconduct — a critical bar for attendance-based terminations.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that federal employers retain meaningful authority to enforce facially neutral attendance policies even against employees with recognized disabilities, so long as the policies themselves are applied consistently and the employee cannot show the proffered reason is a cover for discriminatory animus. The ruling draws a sharp line between terminating someone because of disability and terminating them for misconduct that may be related to a disability — a distinction that frequently arises in federal-sector employment litigation under the Rehabilitation Act.
The court’s exhaustion analysis is also notable for practitioners: it confirms that each distinct theory of discrimination — disparate treatment versus failure to accommodate — carries its own exhaustion obligation, and that an EEOC charge focused on specific adverse actions will not be read broadly enough to import a separate accommodation theory into subsequent litigation, even when the broader context of the charge touches on the employee’s disability.