An Administrator's Guide to California Private School Law

Chapter 7 - Recognizing And Preventing Harassment, Discrimination And Retaliation

 Whether a member of the protected class would consider the harassment hostile and offensive, i.e., the “reasonable victim” standard. 908

These same factors apply to cases involving harassing educational environments, except the analysis for unreasonable interference looks at whether the harassing conduct interferes with the student’s academic performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive educational environment. 909 Conduct amounting to harassment may include:  Speech, such as epithets, derogatory comments, slurs, jokes, teasing, or lewd propositions; 910

 Physical acts, such as assault, impeding or blocking movement, offensive touching, unwelcome hugging 911 , or any physical interference with normal movement;  Visuals, such as derogatory or graphic, posters, cartoons, or drawings;  Intimidation, ridicule, and insult; 912  Unwanted sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or other acts of a sexual nature where submission is made a term or condition of employment or where submission to or rejection of the conduct is used as the basis for employment decisions, or where the conduct is intended to or actually does unreasonably interfere with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment; 913 and  Widespread supervisor favoritism toward select subordinates that communicates a message that a way to advance is to have close friendships or sex with supervisors. 914

Up through 2018, to establish a hostile environment harassment claim, an individual needed to show that: (1) he or she was subjected to verbal, visual or physical conduct of a harassing nature because of any protected status; 915 (2) the conduct was both subjectively and objectively offensive; and, (3) the conduct was sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the employee’s working environment or a student’s educational environment so as to create an abusive environment. 916 Effective January 1, 2019, a new section of the Government Code, enacted by SB 1300, declares that “harassment creates a hostile, offensive, oppressive, or intimidating work environment and deprives victims of their statutory right to work in a place free of discrimination when the harassing conduct sufficiently offends, humiliates, distresses, or intrudes upon its victim, so as to disrupt the victim’s emotional tranquility in the workplace, affect the victim’s ability to perform the job as usual, or otherwise interfere with and undermine the victim’s personal sense of well- being.” 917 Under this new law, even one single incident of harassing conduct is enough to create a hostile work environment if the conduct unreasonably interfered with the employee’s work performance or created an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment. 918 This analysis depends on the totality of the circumstances, and a single discriminatory remark, even if

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