The Santa Rosa Junior College Board of Trustees decided in closed session to deny an appeal filed on behalf of three employees who claim they suffered sexual harassment after being exposed to child pornography while working at SRJC District Police.
The three employees filed the harassment complaint was filed after they found and viewed the contents of another employee’s personal thumb drive on April 26 that contained 40 graphic images of child sexual abuse. The images were evidence from a January 2013 arrest of a man viewing child pornography at Plover Hall. The employees opened the drive to try to figure out its owner.
Attorney Gail Flatt, who filed the appeal, represents the three employees. The employees protest the SRJC administration’s rejection of the sexual harassment claims.
Flatt addressed the Board before its closed session and gave an impassioned plea that trustees should accept the appeal. The affected employees, Vanessa Spaeth, Wendy Wasik and Josh Richards accompanied her.
Flatt reiterated the specifics of the complaint and described ongoing discrimination and retaliation since the employees filed their complaints. “What that does is [it] chills the next person who might want to make a complaint of discrimination or harassment,” she said.
Flatt mentioned a complaint the employees filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as the next step. The EEOC is a federal agency that receives tens of thousands of complaints against employers annually and has the task of deciding which complaints have merit or must be further investigated.
Filing with the EEOC is one course of action, while filing a lawsuit is another. “I like to leave no stone unturned before I file a lawsuit to try and get things resolved if possible,” Flatt said.
Regardless of the merits of the original complaints, Flatt said, district policy, state and federal laws prevent retaliation against employees for filing complaints. She said this is what has occurred and the district could have handled the complaints more professionally.
Some of the retaliation involves increased scrutiny against the employees who complained, arbitrary transfers to other departments and intimidation by other district employees, Flatt said.
Josh Richards, one of the employees who were exposed to the graphic images, said the experience has been trying. He said his email was broken into at the department; someone printed confidential emails between Richards and his attorney and handed copies to various employees at the department, with a copy making its way to Chris Reynolds, the private investigator SRJC hired to investigate the allegations.
Richards said the department became a hostile environment after he filed the complaints. He felt he had to keep looking over his shoulder.
“People were going through stuff; they were going through our cubbies. We had to start locking stuff again,” Richards said.
He said the harassment validated his feelings of insecurity while working at the department. Not only was the chief giving him trouble, but so were the sergeants and his coworkers.
Richards, who was hired by former interim Police Chief Joe Palla, said the differences between the morale under Palla and current chief Matt McCaffrey are like night and day.
“With Joe Palla, everybody was united. Everybody was working together,” Richards said. “Now, there is a definite split. You have your good old boys, which apparently is just the sworn officers, and then you have the rest.”
Vanessa Spaeth, another employee who had filed an appeal to the board, has detailed what she described as harassment and intimidation at the hands of fellow District Police employees. She said the owner of the flash drive was verbally hostile to her and made what she felt were veiled threats against her.
Spaeth said, “We are willing to go all the way with this; we are not going to back down.” Spaeth said that she knows that the board has the ability to do the right thing, whether or not they will is another question.
The Human Resources Department sent Spaeth a letter on Sept. 19 ordering her to transfer to the kinesiology department to serve as an administrative assistant, a move that would effectively prevent her from receiving raises and cost-of-living increases. Spaeth’s attorney says that this is an arbitrary move violating the collective bargaining agreement between the district and the union that represents employees.
Now that the board has rejected the appeal of the three, they are able to appeal that decision to the State Chancellor’s office, a move Flatt said she is considering.
