Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—RELIGIOUS—School district properly accommodated religious objection to COVID-19 vaccine, (Mar 6, 2025)

By George Basharis, J.D.

The court found the district’s weekly testing was a reasonable accommodation for the employee who refused vaccination on religious grounds.

A federal court in Oregon has ruled that a school district’s requirement for weekly COVID-19 testing was a reasonable accommodation for an employee who refused vaccination on religious grounds. The decision upholds the termination of a school employee who was granted a religious exception to the vaccine mandate but refused to comply with the testing alternative (Green v. South Lane School District, No. 6:23-cv-01630-MC (D. Or. Mar. 4, 2025)).

Communicable disease plan. The case arose from Oregon’s pandemic-era policies requiring school staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In August 2021, the South Lane School District informed employees that it had entered into an agreement with the plaintiff’s union, the South Lane Education Association, to follow a Communicable Disease Management Plan with COVID-19 specific guidelines. This plan outlined prevention and mitigation measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, including the vaccination requirement in accordance with state administrative rules.

Oregon vaccine rule. Moreover, the district informed employees of the Oregon Health Authority Vaccine Rule, which stated that as of October 18, 2021, school staff could not “teach, work, learn, study, assist, observe, or volunteer at a school unless they are fully vaccinated or have provided documentation of a medical or religious exception.” Once a religious exception was accepted, the district’s agreement with the employee union required “[t]he district take reasonable steps to ensure that unvaccinated school employees... who have been granted an exception are protected from contracting and spreading COVID-19.”

Religious exemption. The employee, a practicing Buddhist who began working for South Lane School District in 2017, sought and received a religious exception to the vaccine requirement. According to the employee, she believed receiving any of the available COVID-19 vaccines would make her “complicit in abortion” and that vaccination involved “tampering with what God has created.”

Termination. The school district granted her religious exception but required accommodations including wearing a mask, practicing social distancing, and undergoing weekly COVID-19 testing. When the employee refused the testing requirement, she was terminated from her position in November 2021. The court record revealed that the employee interacted with teachers, students, and others across various classrooms and settings, including working with “medically fragile students” in an environment that “lends itself to the quick spread of communicable diseases such as the COVID-19 virus.”

Failure to accommodate. The court analyzed the employee’s failure-to-accommodate claims under both Title VII and Oregon state law, applying a two-part, burden-shifting framework to evaluate religious discrimination allegations. This required the employee to first establish a prima facie case by demonstrating three elements: that she possessed a genuine religious belief in conflict with an employment requirement, that she properly notified her employer about this conflict, and that she subsequently faced discriminatory treatment, including termination, because she could not fulfill the job requirement due to her religious conviction.

The court found she met this initial burden. She held a sincere religious belief against vaccination, notified the district of this conflict, and showed that her refusal to accept the vaccine based on religious beliefs was “a substantial factor in the decision to terminate her employment.” Once this threshold was met, the burden shifted to the school district to demonstrate it made good-faith efforts to reasonably accommodate the religious practice or show it could not accommodate without undue hardship.

The court determined that the district’s proffered accommodations—masking, social distancing, and weekly testing—were reasonable in a school setting and would have allowed the employee to maintain her employment status unchanged. The court noted that her objections to testing appeared to be based on secular rather than religious concerns. According to court records, the employee initially rejected testing because she opposed being “part of a data collecting project” and cited concerns about ethylene oxide exposure and testing effectiveness. The court observed that “Title VII, however, does not protect secular preferences.”

Rapid test request. The court highlighted that it was only after the district filed for summary judgment that the employee claimed testing was against her religious beliefs, requesting instead to use rapid tests that “DO NOT require the use of people having to give up their DNA to be tested and manipulated for research purposes.”

The employee argued the accommodations were unreasonable because they were “designed and engineered to punish, ostracize, expose, and humiliate religious teachers who declined the vaccine for religious reasons.” She also acknowledged that such accommodations “may have been reasonable if [she] were working in a clinical setting with vulnerable populations,” while simultaneously confirming she worked with “medically fragile” students. The court found this contradiction significant, noting that she “makes no argument that the District’s goal to reduce the COVID-19 risk among this student population was unreasonable.”

Undue hardship. The court also addressed the district’s alternative argument that allowing the employee’s preferred accommodation of rapid testing would have imposed an undue hardship on the employer. The court explained that an accommodation causes undue hardship when it results in more than a de minimis cost to the employer. Additionally, courts have recognized that an employer is not liable under Title VII when accommodating an employee’s religious beliefs would require violating federal or state law.

The district presented two compelling hardship arguments. First, it was required to follow the Oregon Health Authority Vaccine Rule, which included specific guidelines about test usage. The district had to assure state authorities it would “not use the supplied [rapid] test kits to perform ‘screening’ tests on people without symptoms and no known exposure to COVID-19.” Second, allowing the employee to work without agreeing to the required accommodations would have exposed the district to legal liability and statutory civil penalties under state law, which imposed fines of “$500 per day per violation” for schools violating the vaccine rule.

In granting the district’s motion for summary judgment, the court determined that the employee was offered reasonable accommodation that would have preserved her employment while addressing the school’s legitimate concerns about protecting medically vulnerable students. The court concluded that her objection to testing appeared primarily based on secular concerns about data collection and test effectiveness rather than religious beliefs. Moreover, even if her preferred accommodation of rapid testing was considered, the court continued, it would have caused undue hardship by potentially violating state regulations and exposing the district to significant financial penalties.

The case is No. 6:23-cv-01630-MC.

Judge: McShane, M.

Attorneys: Paul Robert Armstrong Janzen (Rugged Law) for Kimberly Green. Elliot Robert Field (Garrett Hemann Robertson) for South Lane School District.

Companies: South Lane School District

Cases: ReligiousDiscrimination Discrimination OregonNews