The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); Denial of paid leave to attend a training course to obtain a guide dog; 42 USC §§ 12112(a) & (b)(5)(a); Failure-to-accommodate claim; Disparate-treatment claim; Whether defendants violated the Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in denying paid leave

The court affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment for defendant-employer (Lakota Local School District) on plaintiff-Tumbleson’s ADA disparate-treatment and failure-to-accommodate claims, as well as her FMLA claim. It held that (1) she failed to offer evidence that Lakota treated nondisabled personnel more favorably, (2) “unpaid leave qualified as a ‘reasonable’ accommodation[,]” and (3) the FMLA in this case did “not allow her to substitute paid sick leave for the unpaid leave.” Tumbleson, who is both visually and hearing impaired, was an art teacher for Lakota. She requested three weeks leave to attend a training course on how to use a guide dog she had been matched with. She requested paid leave to attend the course. “Lakota denied her request for paid leave because this training did not qualify as a ‘personal illness’ under the district’s sick-leave policy. But it allowed her to take unpaid leave as an accommodation under” the ADA. Tumbleson sued for disparate treatment and failure-to-accommodate under the ADA. She also sued under the FMLA, alleging that Lakota improperly denied her request to use her accrued paid sick days in lieu of unpaid leave. The district granted Lakota summary judgment. On appeal, the court held that that she failed to show that Lakota treated “similarly situated,” nondisabled employees more favorably when they requested paid leave. She failed to “offer a single example of a nondisabled employee who received sick leave even when the employee’s proposed absence did not qualify for that leave.” The court also held that the unpaid-leave accommodation was reasonable. Tumbleson’s failure-to-accommodate claim could not succeed “because the ADA did not give her the right to her preferred accommodation.” Finally, the court held that her FMLA claim failed where she was only entitled to paid sick leave “if Lakota would ‘normally’ provide that leave under the circumstances” and she only provided “a bare-bones challenge to the district court’s conclusion that her guide-dog training did not qualify for paid leave under Lakota’s sick-leave policy.”