Labor & Employment – Disability Discrimination – Administrative Remedies – Exhaustion – Wheelchair

Sydnor v. Fairfax County, Va. (Lawyers Weekly No. 12-01-0690, 11 pp.) (Wilkinson, J.) No. 11-1573, June 19, 2012; USDC at Alexandria, Va. (Cacheris, J.) 4^th Cir. Full-text opinion.

Holding: A public health nurse who said her employer violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not allowing her to use a wheelchair for her restrictions after foot surgery gets another chance to try her case, as the 4^th Circuit says the district court erred in saying she had not exhausted her administrative remedies by mentioning light duty work but not a wheelchair in her EEOC complaint.

According to the county, the accommodation plaintiff raised at summary judgment – working full duty with the assistance of a wheelchair – is so “fundamentally different” from the one mentioned in her EEOC questionnaire – light duty work – that she failed to satisfy the exhaustion requirement.

We are not persuaded. The variation in these proposed accommodations does not mean that plaintiff failed to exhaust her administrative remedies. The touchstone for exhaustion is whether plaintiff’s administrative and judicial claims are reasonably related, not precisely the same, and there are sufficient similarities between the two to find this requirement satisfied here. Plaintiff’s case against the county did not involve shifting sets and a rotating cast of characters that would have deprived her former employer of notice of the allegations against it. Plaintiff’s administrative and judicial claims also focused on the same type of discrimination. The county was on notice from the beginning that it was accused of not providing a disabled plaintiff with a reasonable accommodation.

To be sure, there is a difference between light duty work and full duty work with wheelchair assistance. But even here, these different proposals are linked together by a similarity – whatever the task, plaintiff faced the same difficulties in walking after her foot surgery and needed some form of accommodation. Because one logical accommodation for this specific disability was the use of a wheelchair, the county should not have been caught off guard when it was eventually raised.

Dismissal of the suit for failure to exhaust is reversed, and case remanded.