Christopher Peak Photo
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin: Superintendent gutted my job.
A top school administrator who adopted an infant from the foster care system returned from a three-month maternity leave to find that her boss had stripped her of several job responsibilities.
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, previously the Office of Youth, Family & Community Engagement’s chief, has filed a lawsuit claiming that Superintendent Carol Birks retaliated against her for taking maternity leave, in violation of federal law and her employment contract.
Under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), employees are entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave within a year, and they are entitled to return to the same position — or at least one that’s close enough — with the same pay, benefits and terms and conditions of employment.
Families who take in children, either as a foster or adoptive parents, qualify for those protections. Usually, once a placement happens, federal law requires the leave “to bond with a child” to be taken “as a continuous block,” unless the employer agrees to let the person work on a reduced schedule.
The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court earlier this month, asks for a jury to reinstate Joseph Lumpkin to her old position “as it was structured prior to the plaintiff taking FMLA leave,” along with monetary damages.
Birks did not respond to an email seeking comment. Both Joseph Lumpkin and her attorney, Thomas Bucci, declined to comment.
Joseph Lumpkin was promoted as the school district’s chief of engagement in 2015.
In that role, Joseph Lumpkin has focused on connecting anyone who cares about kids, so that their work is “collective, cumulative, consistent and effective,” the lawsuit says. That’s happened both externally, by involving families, government officials and social-service providers, and internally, by encouraging collaboration across departments.
Joseph Lumpkin has also connected vendors with no-bid contracts that have proved controversial. They include a former alder whom she claimed the district needed to hire to meet federal mandates (in a departure from Hartford’s and Bridgeport’s practice), and a psychologist who later pulled all her business out of the district in the face of public questioning.
(Note: Lumpkin who serves on the board of directors for the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit entity that owns the Independent.)
In late 2017, Joseph Lumpkin took in a newborn, Nora, as a foster parent for the Department of Children and Families.
After a year, as she prepared to formally adopt the baby girl, she found out that Nora had a younger brother who’d just been born and taken into protective custody. Joseph Lumpkin told the Department of Children and Families that she’d take him in too.
According to the complaint, Joseph Lumpkin told Superintendent Birks and Deputy Superintendent Ivelise Velazquez about the situation the next day, on Oct. 3, 2018.
She took a long weekend, then put in a request for intermittent leave under FMLA on Oct. 11, 2018. That would allow Joseph Lumpkin to continue working on a reduced schedule, which she explained in the complaint, “would allow her to work and be a team player yet care for the newborn.”
The district’s human resources team signed off on it, saying that Joseph Lumpkin could take the time to “recover from your own serious health condition.” But shortly after, they told Joseph Lumpkin that Birks had questioned why she was out.
Two weeks later, on Oct. 31, 2018, Joseph Lumpkin sat down with the human resources team to go over the questions about her FMLA eligibility.
Instead of continuing to work part-time, she asked for an extended leave to bond with her new son, whom a doctor had said was “medically fragile” after his birth mother had used “illegal addictive substances throughout the entire pregnancy,” even through delivery.
The district’s human resources team signed off on that updated request, allowing Joseph Lumpkin to be out until Jan. 8, 2019.
Joseph Lumpkin argues in the lawsuit that, while she was away, Superintendent Birks began to tamper with her job.
She alleges that Birks told Board of Education members that she was “absent from work without proper leave and inaccurate paperwork,” and she heard from a coworker that the 16 dropout prevention workers that she used to oversee were now being managed by the assistant superintendents.
Three days after the FMLA leave ended, on Jan. 12, 2019, Deputy Superintendent Velazquez told Joseph Lumpkin that the dropout prevention team would no longer report to her.
A week after that, on Jan. 18, 2019, Velazquez again stopped by her office to say that more changes had been made, as the supervisor of youth development, Kermit Carolina, would also no longer report to her. According to the complaint, Velazquez told Joseph Lumpkin that this transfer was done “solely at the direction of the superintendent” without her consultation.
At some point, Birks also took the Saturday Academy, an enrichment program for about 400 students, out of Joseph Lumpkin’s duties.
In the lawsuit, Joseph Lumpkin argues that those changes constitute “unlawful retaliation and discrimination” and “interference with … [her] rights” under the FMLA. She also argues that it breaches her contract, which says that Joseph Lumpkin can be terminated only for “just cause.”
“The position of Chief of the Office of Youth, Family and Community Engagement to which plaintiff had returned had been fundamentally altered by the superintendent of schools,” the complaint argues. “Incrementally, the defendant has been eliminating the plaintiff’s duties and responsibilities, leaving her without meaningful employment.”
The district was served with papers last week. It has not yet notified the court who will be arguing its side.
This lawsuit seems pretty cut and dried, and the City should settle it quickly.
What the heck was Birks thinking?