Teacher’s Civil Rights Suit May Cost District Millions : Courts: Judge orders Capistrano Unified to forfeit federal funding unless it compensates veteran instructor.

The Capistrano Unified School District stands to lose millions of dollars in federal funding because of a judge’s conclusion that high-ranking administrators harassed and discriminated against an award-winning teacher for years.

John F. Cook, an administrative law judge for the U.S. Department of Education, has decided that district administrators, including former Supt. Jerome Thornsley, violated Ruth Geis’ civil rights and retaliated against her for legal actions she took to save her job.

Cook ruled that Capistrano Unified should lose $1.5 million a year in federal funds unless it takes steps to compensate Geis and implement a districtwide policy to stop similar discrimination against other teachers. Federal education officials said that such harsh decisions are rare in civil rights grievances.

“They were not out to get me, they did get me,” said Geis, a veteran high school teacher who has pursued a battery of lawsuits and complaints against Capistrano Unified since 1981. “But if the district wanted to get rid of me, they made a huge mistake.”

Despite the highly critical decision, district officials steadfastly deny that they discriminated against Geis or pursued an unwritten policy of forcing veteran, highly paid teachers into less attractive positions as a way to get them to retire.

“The administration did not sit around and plot against Ruth,” said Linda Kroner, who was director of employee relations for Capistrano Unified from 1980 to 1991. “We didn’t have a practice of animosity toward people who filed things they had a right to file, and nothing was done for retaliatory reasons against her by me or anyone else involved.”

Cook’s 72-page decision was released in July after four days of testimony in June. The district has appealed the case, and further hearings are pending.

Thornsley, who retired after the 1990-91 school year, said there was never any retaliation and faulted Geis for continually bringing what he considered to be groundless complaints that pestered top-ranking district administrators.

“She had a daughter (Ellen) who was an attorney and they filed complaints with every state and federal agency they could find,” he said. “Our personnel office was inundated. That went on for years and years and years.”

Capistrano Unified Supt. James Fleming, who replaced Thornsley, says he is baffled by the case and plans to settle the matter as soon as possible. He has already met once with Geis to discuss the situation.

“It’s been quite an eye-opening experience,” said Fleming, noting that Cook’s lengthy decision reads like a novel. “It doesn’t look good for the district.”

To prevent the loss of funds, school attorneys also say they now hope to reach an amicable resolution with the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education. Among other things, Christian M. Keiner, a lawyer for Capistrano Unified, contends that the hearing was not an independent review of the facts and that Cook erred when he decided to withhold federal money from programs that did not relate to Geis’ allegations.

The district will continue to receive funding until all appeals are exhausted.

Geis, a bespectacled 64-year-old with champagne-gray hair and 30 years in the classroom, has worked for Capistrano Unified since 1974. Speech teams under her direction have won honors, and her performance evaluations have been excellent, according to evidence presented to Judge Cook.

She has bachelor’s degrees in history and political science and a master’s degree in English. UC Irvine named her a mentor teacher, a designation that has given her a leadership role in developing teaching practices for humanities classes.

Her fight with the district began in 1981. A week before school started, Geis, then 55, was transferred from San Clemente High to Niguel Hills Junior High, where the English department staff was all female.

At the time, Geis had taught high school for more than 20 years, and her colleagues in the San Clemente English department--all of them men--had less seniority. Geis contended the move violated her employment contract and discriminated against her.

Thornsley and San Clemente Principal John Smart said there was simply an oversupply of English teachers at the high school and someone had to be moved. In addition, Kroner, who handled virtually all employee-related matters for the district, said the transfer was proper and never meant to be permanent.

Geis didn’t buy the explanation. She said she was never told the move was temporary and that she could eventually get her old job back.

“I had seen instances of what I thought were older people being moved out,” she said. “I had reached age 55 and there was now an opportunity for the district to discriminate against me.”

Eight days after being transferred, Geis filed a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court, alleging age and sex discrimination. It was the first of several lawsuits and grievances she would file with state and federal agencies.

While the first lawsuit was pending, Geis was reassigned to Dana Hills High and eventually returned to her original post at San Clemente--although the district, she said, had tried to deny that there was a staff opening.

Kroner said that Geis’ reassignment to the high school level had nothing to do with her lawsuit, which eventually was settled for a small amount of money. Thornsley recalled that he had promised to send Geis back to San Clemente High because of her verbal complaints to him.

Geis said she thought the controversy was over until the 1983-84 school year, when she was told she would not direct the extracurricular debate team nor receive a $900 stipend for participating in the after-school program. Smart told Geis she would not get paid because funds were unavailable.

At the time, the school’s longstanding policy was to hire the current speech teacher as director, according to court documents. In this case it would have been Geis, yet the assignment went to the school’s previous speech and debate teacher.

During the federal hearings in June, district records suggested that funds were available for Geis’ stipend. A surplus of more than $4,000, earmarked for extracurricular activities, was sitting in district coffers when Smart told Geis there was no money.

In his decision, Cook noted that all teachers who had taught the extracurricular speech program received the stipend except Geis. He also wrote that the district offered no logical explanation on why the stipend was not paid.

The next school year, Smart and other district officials did not assign speech and debate classes to Geis. A few days before school opened in 1984, Smart offered the courses to Kathy Brown, a younger and less-experienced teacher who specialized in business administration.

Geis, who had made speech and debate a specialty, was stunned.

“It was the two worst years in my career,” Geis recalled. “I believe the district caused enormous injury to the students and it was very hard for me to stand by and watch her (Brown) attempt to do the job.”

Smart, who participated in the decision to replace Geis, had given the veteran teacher a glowing evaluation for the 1983-84 school year, rating her as “outstanding” and “very effective,” according to court records. In his evaluation, he could recommend no ways for Geis to improve her instruction.

Yet Smart testified during Geis’ civil-rights hearing that Brown was the “most logical” and “most qualified” teacher to assume speech duties--an explanation Cook found incredible.

“A thorough review of Ms. Brown’s credentials indicates that she was not the most logical, nor the most qualified,” the judge wrote.

According to Cook’s decision, Smart and then-Supt. Thornsley played a role in the district’s retaliation against Geis.

“As principal, John Smart was able to directly affect her employment, while Supt. Thornsley was able to indirectly affect her employment through expressed or implied pressure on his subordinates,” Cook wrote. Thornsley’s “own testimony and his staff’s revealed that he was closely involved in the day-to-day handling of” Geis’ case.

Smart has repeatedly denied such a role, but would not comment further because the case is still pending. Thornsley also told The Times that he was not directly involved in the case and criticized Geis for putting the district through “a enormous number of hoops.”

“When she got back to San Clemente (High), she didn’t get her schedule or her speech assignment,” Thornsley said. “She wanted to name what school she taught at and what classes she got and what assignments. That’s utterly ridiculous.”

Thornsley asserted that the dispute with Geis was not worth the federal funds given to the district. “We don’t get a great deal of money,” he said. “It was hardly worth the reporting and auditing.”

Although the school district’s budget is roughly $110 million to $120 million, Kroner, who worked for Thornsley, said that the $1.5 million in federal funds was important in helping to pay for educational programs.

“Those would be a shame to lose,” Kroner said, “and you would not want to lose any money in this present economic climate.”

Officials for U.S. Department of Education described the judge’s decision to withhold funds from Capistrano Unified as exceptional. They estimated that at least 99 out of 100 civil rights complaints they handle settle without a trial. Attorneys for the department declined to comment because an appeal is pending with the Civil Rights Reviewing Authority, a body within the Department of Education.

In the Geis case, the federal department issued findings in 1987 which concluded that the district had violated her civil rights, but Capistrano Unified declined to settle and pursued the case for the next four years.

Geis contended that the district had a chance to settle in a way that could have avoided the threat to funding and the costs of defending the case.

Thornsley agreed that the federal government had tried repeatedly to settle with the district. He said he could not compromise, though, and found the meetings with federal representatives to be “obnoxious and intimidating.”

“If you are guilty you might settle with them,” Thornsley said. “But why compromise when it isn’t true? The hell with that. Our position was if those bureaucrats want to make their living like that, the hell with them.”

While the civil rights complaint worked its way through the Department of Education, Geis contends, the harassment continued unabated. According to a pending lawsuit filed against the district, Geis was passed up for choice assignments and received unwarranted reprimands for minor incidents.

Among other things, Geis was cited for writing found on a student desk and for failing to get parent permission to show the Academy Award-winning movie “Children of a Lesser God” to her class. But, Geis said, she kept the permission slips.

More importantly, Geis said, she was denied an opportunity to teach advanced-placement English, a demanding high school course in which students can earn college credit. Geis has nine years’ experience teaching the class and has achieved strong results, some of the best at San Clemente High.

In the last few years, Geis said, she asked to teach the course because no one else had requested it. She recalled that the district denied her the position and then canceled one of the classes when they could not find another teacher.

“I was told the district was looking for a more experienced person,” Geis said.

Kroner, who is now vice chancellor of human resources at Saddleback College, said Geis’ situation was handled properly by the district and the reprimands she received were justified.

“We were following our procedures all along,” Kroner said. “I know that she firmly believes that all this happened to her, and I consider that unfortunate. What she says was never the case from the standpoint of the administration.”