Final judgment issued in NASD discrimination case
Published 12:04 am Saturday, January 30, 2016
NATCHEZ — A federal judge issued a final judgment this week awarding a total of nearly $668,000 to a white principal who successfully argued the Natchez-Adams School District’s top administrators racially discriminated against her.
U.S. District Court Judge David Bramlette III issued the order Wednesday, which outlines a total of $667,916.27 to be paid to former principal Cindy Idom.
The judgment includes $271,737 in back pay with 3.5-percent annually compounding interest on the backpay. Idom will also receive $175,210 in attorney fees, $8,000.02 in non-taxable and expert costs, $4,474.25 in taxable costs and $108,495 in front pay.
The judgment also includes $75,000 from Superintendent Frederick Hill and $25,000 from Assistant Superintendent Tanisha Smith.
Idom said Friday she is pleased with the judgment.
“I’ll just be glad when all this is over,” she said.
The school district could still file an appeal in the case but NASD Board of Trustees President Tim Blalock said the board has not discussed taking action on an appeal.
“We were informed the judgment came through, but there was no discussion on that (at the board meeting) today,” Blalock said.
Idom filed her case in May 2014, 10 months after resigning her then-post at Frazier Elementary School at the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year. She had been transferred there a month earlier after 11 years as principal at West Elementary School
During the trial, Idom said school district officials told the court she was disciplined for incidents in which black principals who had done the same thing weren’t and was the target of aggressive management techniques that were tantamount to bullying.
Idom said she resigned following a meeting with Hill and Smith in July 2013 in which she was removed as principal and told she could only have a position as a teacher, a human resources move Idom called “a degrading demotion.”
Idom said the demotion was predicated on low standardized test scores at West.
But the school had only taken the tests for the first time in 2013, and Idom was not given a chance to improve them before being transferred and then demoted, she said.
Idom told the court West did not receive needed facility upgrades following the district-wide reorganization from grade-based to neighborhood-based schools in 2012, creating an educational environment that often made adequate teaching difficult.
Two other wrongful termination lawsuits against the school district are pending, though the plaintiffs in those cases — Shannon Doughty and Regina McCoy — did not allege race discrimination.
In those cases, both plaintiffs allege they faced demotion or resignation based on projections of school performance test scores that predicted the schools at which they were employed would fail. When the scores came out, however, the schools improved.