A person with pedophobia, a fear of young children, suing the school that employed her is akin to a child who murders his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the courts on the grounds that he is an orphan.
Granted, the case of Maria Waltherr-Willard, a foreign-language teacher, is somewhat more complicated than that. According to Cincinnati ABC affiliate KVUE, Waltherr-Willard was initially hired to teach high school-level French in Cincinnati’s Mariemont district. But in 2009, the district shifted its French course online and Waltherr-Willard was transferred to a middle school. She taught there six months and then retired after her request to be reassigned to the high school was rejected.
That is when her disability entered the picture. Waltherr-Willard, who argued that her illness should have prevented the district from transferring in the first place, sued. But the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio, however, rejected her disability claim, ruling that the Americans With Disabilities Act “requires an employer to accommodate a disabled employee, but it does not require unreasonable accommodations.”
The ADA does not require employers to create new jobs, the judge added.
The court also threw out her age-discrimination claim.
