EEOC Charges Filed

EEOC Charges Filed

Debbie and Stuart Prost

EEOC Charges Filed Against

Virginia's So-called

Disability Rights Agency

by Charles Brown

From the Editor: Charlie Brown is the

President of the National Federation of the Blind of Virginia and a Member of the NFB

Board of Directors. The following report is reprinted from the Winter, 1998, issue of the

NFB Vigilant, a publication of the NFB of Virginia. Stuart Prost is a long-time member of

the National Federation of the Blind. His wife Debbie was honored as the NFB's 1997

Distinguished Educator of Blind Children. She teaches in the Tidewater area of Virginia,

where they live, so when employment transportation problems began to develop for Stuart,

the Prosts did not have the option of moving in order to keep his job because Debbie would

then have been faced with the same problem in reverse. Here is Charlie Brown's explanation

of the situation:

The Department of Rights for Virginians with

Disabilities (DRVD) is the one state agency charged with protecting the civil rights of

disabled Virginians. Its mission is to see that blind people and other disabled folks get

a fair shake in employment, education, government services, and the like. One would think

that the DRVD would want to set an example in employing the disabled, but I'm afraid

that's just not so.

On February 26, 1998, Federationist Stuart Prost

filed formal discrimination charges with the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity

Commission (EEOC) against the DRVD, alleging that he was illegally forced out of his job

as a disability rights advocate with DRVD in violation of the Americans with Disabilities

Act.

Mr. Prost had served the DRVD well for over ten

years as an advocate in its former Virginia Beach office. Federationists will recall that

we adopted a resolution at our last State Convention which vigorously criticized the DRVD

for closing its Virginia Beach office, leaving the residents of Virginia's largest

population area without a local office. The DRVD director, Sandy Reen, claimed she just

had to close that office, but she did not close the DRVD offices in Richmond, Northern

Virginia, and Fishersville. We were not the only ones to criticize Ms. Reen's arbitrary

decision to cut services in the Hampton-Roads area; other disability groups, the media,

and General Assembly members also complained, to no avail.

Mr. Prost was then ordered to report to the

DRVD's Richmond Office. If he had been sighted, he would have had the option of driving up

each day from his home in Portsmouth, as his former Virginia Beach Office co-worker

decided to do. He checked into possible alternate transportation, but the schedules didn't

work. Mr. Prost asked for some reasonable accommodation to his blindness, as called for in

the Americans with Disabilities Act. Since it was clear that disabled Hampton-Roads

residents would have to be served from the Richmond Office, it was certain that Mr. Prost

would have to spend much of his time back in that area anyway, visiting places like the

Eastern State Hospital. To cut down on travel time and to make it possible for him to

continue to work for the DRVD, Mr. Prost asked that he be allowed to do part of his job by

telecommuting—tying his phone, computer, and fax machine through the main Richmond

DRVD switchboard.

Today telecommuting is becoming commonplace,

especially for those responsible for covering large geographic territories. Many

businesses and government agencies use this approach effectively, including other Virginia

State agencies. I certainly agreed with Mr. Prost that telecommuting would be reasonable

accommodation in his case. I discussed this with Ms. Reen on more than one occasion over

the phone and even went down to Richmond to meet with her about it. She was adamantly

opposed to any such option, period, while offering no suggestions of her own. Frankly I

was amazed at Ms. Reen's bureaucratic attitude. In any event, her failure to offer any

reasonable accommodation to Mr. Prost's situation resulted in his forced resignation in

January.

Filing a federal complaint was obviously a last

resort for Mr. Prost. After all, he just wants to continue to work for DRVD. But at this

point Mr. Prost and the Federation simply had no other choice.

When Sandy Reen took over at DRVD, she had our

organization's full support and that of many others; but she has wasted this good will.

During her tenure as DRVD director Ms. Reen has been criticized in the media for DRVD's

failure to protect the rights of patients at Central State Hospital, a highly negative

evaluation from the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, the closing of the

Virginia Beach Office, and more. Now Ms. Reen's unwillingness to provide reasonable

accommodation to Mr. Prost as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act has forced

out the DRVD's only blind employee. The Prost case is just one more embarrassment for this

deeply troubled agency. This case is likely to be long and laborious, but when an agency

charged with protecting the rights of disabled people engages in discrimination, what

choice do we have but to fight?