A Black school cafeteria worker accepted a $60,000 payment to settle a federal discrimination lawsuit after being stripped of her job duties involving disciplining children because white teachers allegedly didn’t like “the sound, tone or tenor of her ‘Black voice.’”
Vanessa Bowie-Middleton, 60, had worked in school kitchens and cafeterias for 17 years and for Washoe County School District near Reno since 2019 when the school principal, Heidi Gavrilles, came into the kitchen in January of 2022 and gave her an upsetting directive.
From now on, the principal did not want Bowie-Middleton, who was the kitchen manager at Bohach Elementary, to reprimand or discipline any of the students in the cafeteria because some white teachers “did not like the way [Bowie-Middleton] spoke and/or her accent or dialect and felt a Black woman should not be giving instructions to unruly cafeteria students,” her lawsuit says.
On the same day, Gavrilles also told her not to speak on the school’s PA system, which Bowie-Middleton says she typically used to tell boisterous students to quiet down or to clean up because their lunch period was over.
When asked why, the principal later told a local NAACP leader, Lonnie Feemster, it was because “white teachers did not want to hear a Black voice telling children what to do,” according to a statement he provided to the plaintiff.
Up to that point, Bowie-Middleton says she “loved her job” and especially the children — talking to them, laughing and bantering with them, learning their names, playing music they enjoyed on a speaker she brought in.
Misconduct in the lunchroom was frequent, including screaming and yelling, bullying, throwing food and occasional fights, and over the years Bowie-Middleton had learned how to handle and discipline unruly students, a necessary part of the job, and one that she’d been trained to do by multiple WCSD supervisors, she claims.
When she was hired at Bohach, then-kitchen manager Terri Braunworth, who is white, told her that if teachers were not present when students acted out in the cafeteria, she must “act to maintain safety and security” before the issue escalated and students were harmed, the complaint says. It had been “drilled into her by all kitchen managers” in the school district that “she was not to stand idly by” and let misconduct go unaddressed.
Braunworth affirmed in a statement filed in court that it was often necessary for the nutrition worker and kitchen manager to “correct children’s behavior” and that Bowie-Middleton “was always appropriate” when she reprimanded the kids, who “especially really loved Vanessa.”
The lawsuit contends that the principal’s “blatantly racist directive” to “stifle a Black kitchen manager’s ability to perform her job duties in order to accommodate the racial prejudices of the school’s white teachers who are uncomfortable with the sound of her ‘Black voice’ maintaining order” among students was “racially discriminatory on its face.”
The complaint cited an email by white kitchen co-worker Jennifer Frith sent to the plaintiff’s supervisor in which Frith wrote that she overheard the school principal tell Bowie-Middleton “that some of the white teachers didn’t want a Black woman to reprimand their students” and that “a Black person’s tone and language is different to a white person’s.”
The lawsuit claimed the principal’s directives materially altered the terms of her employment and constituted disparate treatment based on race in violation of federal civil rights law in her lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Nevada in July of 2024. While Bowie-Middleton, the only Black worker in the school’s kitchen, was barred from disciplining students, the complaint argued that similarly situated white kitchen employees, including her subordinates, were allowed to continue reprimanding and disciplining students who misbehaved.
The complaint noted that Bowie-Middleton had received only good job reviews during her employment with the school district, including one in February of 2022 that deemed her “effective” or “highly effective” in all areas, including fostering positive morale and commitment to students.
When emails between Bowie-Middleton and her supervisor and the district superintendent didn’t resolve the issue, an investigation was conducted by the district, which the lawsuit claims did not involve interviews with any of the teachers who had allegedly complained about hearing her voice.
In April of 2022, she received a letter from the district that her complaint was “closed” and that the superintendent did not find “sufficient evidence” to substantiate her allegations of being treated differently and stripped of essential job duties because she was Black.
Bowie-Middleton was “shocked, devastated and sickened” by the school’s discriminatory practices, to the point that she couldn’t sleep, suffered migraines and stomach pain, and became suicidal, the complaint says.
Demoralized, she stopped talking to and interacting with students. She was unable to get any answers from school officials as to which teachers had a problem with her race and how she spoke, and she says she was “humiliated” by being treated as inferior to other school workers.
Meanwhile, when students acted out in the lunchroom, she could “only stand mutely by,” permitting misconduct to continue, and “hope that a teacher or her white subordinate employee … would magically appear,” witness the conduct and take action.
In August 2022, seven months after she had been “silenced” by the principal, Bowie-Middleton says she was informed “out of the blue” by a district employee that she would no longer be prohibited from disciplining misbehaving students.
Bowie-Middleton had by that point suffered “the indignity of discrimination,” sought therapy and incurred related costs and expenses, her lawsuit says. She left her job at Bohach Elementary in January 2023, and remains employed by Washoe County School District at Mendive Middle School as a nutrition worker. Her lawsuit sought a jury trial to determine compensatory damages and cover her legal costs.
In its court filings, the school district claimed that Bowie-Middleton had failed to allege facts to allow a court to find “the reasonable inference” that she had suffered disparate treatment because of her race and didn’t state a plausible claim for relief.
The district’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed in October 2024 argued that disciplining students was never “an essential function” of her job and included sample job descriptions of nutrition worker and kitchen manager roles to back up that contention.
Defense attorneys further asserted that Bowie-Middleton’s complaint “did not identify any specific individuals outside her protected class who were treated differently in similar circumstances” but only offered “conclusory allegations” laden with “irrelevant and unrelated hyperbole.”
In response, Bowie-Middleton fired back in December in her court filing opposing the motion to dismiss that the job descriptions the defense relied on stated in bold, “This job description is not a complete statement of essential functions, responsibilities or job requirements” but represent the “minimum level of knowledge, skill, and/or abilities. Management retains the discretion to add or change typical duties of a position at any time.”
The job descriptions “make clear that a kitchen manager is required to discipline unruly students if she is instructed to do so, trained to do so, and expected to do so by her supervisor,” her filing stated.
It was buttressed by statements from Braunworth, her former manager, who wrote that addressing misconduct was “part of the job,” and from Marcia Iverson, a former nutrition worker at WCSD who worked with Bowie-Middleton at a district high school. Iverson, who is white, also stated it was “a necessary part” of their job to “reprimand unruly students to try and keep order” in the cafeteria, noting that when Bowie-Middleton did so “she was clear and easy to understand.”
When announcing her client’s $60,000 settlement with the school district on Monday, Bowie-Middleton’s attorney, Terri Keyser-Cooper, said in a press release, “Can you imagine, in 2022, a school district principal, telling a Black employee not to talk because white teachers were ‘uncomfortable’ hearing her Black voice! What’s next? Singling out Black workers to use different drinking fountains because certain white teachers don’t want her to drink from the same fountains they drink from? Or telling Black workers to avoid using certain restrooms because of white teachers’ discomfort with sitting on the same toilet they may have sat on? Thankfully, the WCSD saw the wisdom in resolving this case.”
On Tuesda,y the Washoe County School District issued a statement to the Reno Gazette-Journal denying “all of the allegations in this one-sided press release authored by Ms. Keyser-Cooper,” who “is also very aware that a settlement is not an admission of liability by the District which further reinforces how inappropriate her press release is as it attempts to pass off her disputed allegations as facts, when no judge or jury made a ruling in her favor. In fact, the only agency that performed an investigation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, did not make any findings against the District.”
“There are many factors that play into a settlement decision, and the District’s decision to settle was purely a business decision for the purpose of putting our students, families, and employees first,” the statement continued. “This decision also allows the parties to move forward with their employment relationship. It is unfortunate that Ms. Keyser-Cooper chose to put her law firm’s interest ahead of the interests of the parties in this case.”
Keyser-Cooper, a seasoned civil rights lawyer in Reno, then told the Gazette Journal that the district should apologize to Bowie-Middleton, “not insulting her and calling her a liar.”
“Perhaps the WCSD thinks this is the 1950s, and it covers Jackson, Mississippi, or Montgomery, Alabama,” Keyser-Cooper said. “For shame that one of its principals could be so outrageously racist and such strong proof be submitted, and yet the district denies any wrongdoing.”
