Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, EMPLOYEE LEAVE—6th Cir.: Teacher denied paid leave for guide dog training course can’t revive ADA, FMLA claims, (May 14, 2026)

By Kathleen Kapusta, J.D.

The employee suffered from Usher syndrome, which caused progressive hearing and vision loss.

Affirming summary judgment against the ADA claims of an art teacher who lost her vision and hearing as a result of a rare disease, and who unsuccessfully attempted to use paid sick leave to attend a three-week guide dog training course, the Sixth Circuit found that, for purposes of her disparate treatment claim, she failed to show the school district treated nondisabled personnel more favorably and, for purposes of her failure-to-accommodate claim, unpaid leave qualified as a reasonable accommodation. The court likewise affirmed summary judgment against her FMLA claim because it entitled her to paid leave only if the school district would normally provide that under the circumstances and she failed to show she qualified for paid leave under the district’s sick-leave policy (Tumbleson v. Lakota Local School District , No. 25-3548 (6th Cir. May 13, 2026)).

During her 20-year tenure with the district as a middle school art teacher, the employee consistently received positive evaluations despite health challenges from Usher’s syndrome, a rare and incurable genetic disease that causes progressive hearing and vision loss. Cochlear implants in both ears allowed her to continue to hear even though she was “totally deaf” and in 2012, she started using a cane to help her get around as her sight deteriorated. The school district provided her with various accommodations through the years, including non-fluorescent lights, additional floor lamps, and computers with larger monitors.

Guide dog. In 2022, she applied for a guide dog and was accepted into the organization’s five-day orientation and mobility training. The district’s HR director approved her request to use sick days for the training. She formally applied for a guide dog after she finished the training and, by early 2023, was matched with a dog.

Training course. To obtain the dog, however, she had to attend a three-week training course for deaf and blind individuals. She requested paid “sick days (FMLA?)” to attend but because the HR director did not believe the training fell into the permissible reasons for paid sick leave or FMLA leave, he told her she could attend the training using a mix of paid personal days and unpaid leave as an accommodation under the ADA. The employee took unpaid leave and successfully obtained the dog.

She later told her doctor about the district’s refusal to provide her with paid leave and he wrote a letter explaining that she took leave for medical reasons because the guide dog was part of her treatment plan for Usher syndrome and because the guide-dog process required training to keep her safe. Her lawyer then sent a letter to the district, threatening to sue if it did not retroactively allow her to take paid sick leave for the training.

Lower court proceedings. When the district refused to change its mind, the employee sued under the ADA and the FMLA and district court granted summary judgment against all claims.

Disparate treatment. In support of her disparate treatment claim, the employee argued on appeal that the school district violated the ADA by denying her paid sick leave to attend the training. While the district court analyzed the “similarly situated” question at the prima facie stage, finding that she failed to show the school district treated similarly situated employees more favorably in their requests for paid leave, that question, observed the appeals court, also matters for purposes of the pretext analysis.

Because the school district provided a neutral reason for denying the employee’s request for paid sick leave—the training did not fall within the definition of sick leave under the school board’s sick-leave policy, Ohio law, and the CBA, the court, jumping to the final pretext step, turned to whether the employee sufficiently established a jury question over whether the HR director denied her leave because of her disability rather than her training’s failure to qualify for leave.

Animus. In an effort to show the HR director harbored illegal animus, the employee argued that he routinely granted leave to all other teachers without going through the formalities imposed on her. She did not, however, point to a single nondisabled employee who received sick leave even when that individual’s proposed absence did not qualify for sick leave. While she cited the HR director’s testimony that the sick leave “system [was] made to be run through the employee[s]” and that HR did not always preclear the leave, he explained that if an employee requests short-term leave for less than 10 days, HR often does not get involved and a school principal may approve the request. But HR does evaluate a leave request if an employee has “a need for more days.”

Indeed, observed the court, the employee was allowed to use paid sick leave to attend the earlier five-day mobility training but when she asked to take more than 10 days, the HR director analyzed the question and decided that the training did not qualify. “So the undisputed facts,” said the court, “show that [the HR director] applied the same rules to [the employee] that he applied to everyone else.”

HIPAA. And while the employee next argued that HIPAA made it impossible for her to find comparators, the court explained that even if the school district qualified as a covered entity, HIPAA does not prohibit disclosure of protected health information in response to a discovery request in litigation if the requesting party obtains a protective order. Because there was no evidence the employee’s counsel sought discovery about other teachers, the court found her disparate treatment claim failed for lack of evidence.

Failure to accommodate. As to the employee’s failure-to-accommodate claim, the court noted that the school district provided her with unpaid leave to attend the training course and there was no dispute this allowed her to attend the training and obtain the dog. Nor, said the court, was there any evidence linking paid leave to the performance of her job.

While the employee argued that unpaid leave was only “partially responsive” to her request because going three weeks without pay caused financial difficulties for her family, her financial difficulties, said the court, arose outside the work environment and the school district had no duty to accommodate them. Because unpaid leave allowed her to obtain her guide dog, the school district met its obligation to provide a reasonable accommodation, said the court, and the ADA required nothing more.

FMLA claim. Turning to the employee’s claim the FMLA required the school district to grant her request for paid sick leave to attend the training, the court explained that although “the FMLA requires employers to grant leave, it does not require them to pay the employee while off work.” And while the law gives employees the right “to substitute any of [their] accrued paid vacation leave, personal leave, or medical or sick leave” for FMLA leave, “nothing in [the FMLA’s general rules] shall require an employer to provide paid sick leave or paid medical leave in any situation in which such employer would not normally provide any such paid leave.”

Sick leave. To obtain paid leave under the FMLA leave, said the court, the employee needed to show the school district normally provided this leave for those in her situation. The HR director, however, testified that the guide-dog training did not fall within the definition of sick leave under Ohio law, the CBA, or the school board’s sick leave policy. Accordingly, the district court held that the employee did not qualify for paid leave under the FMLA because she did not qualify for it under the school district’s sick-leave policy.

As to what the FMLA means when it says that it does not “require an employer to provide paid sick leave . . . in any situation in which such employer would not normally provide any such paid leave,” the court saw two competing understandings. The district court read the phrase to give federal courts the power to second guess an employer’s interpretation of its own sick-leave policy as a matter of federal law, the court observed, and a regulation does say that “[a]n employee’s ability to substitute accrued paid leave is determined by the terms and conditions of the employer’s normal leave policy.”

But, the court observed, one might also read this language “as imposing an antidiscrimination command that requires employers to follow their ‘usual’ view of their sick-leave policies” and “the regulation elsewhere might support this reading because it says that ‘[e]mployers may not discriminate against employees on FMLA leave in the administration of their paid leave policies.’’

Assuming the FMLA adopts the district court’s understanding that federal courts may reexamine the terms of the school district’s sick-leave policy, that policy, said the court, incorporates Ohio law and the CBA by allowing teachers to “use sick leave for absence due to personal illness[.]” And according to the district court, attending service dog training “falls outside any range of a reasonable interpretation” of the phrase “personal illness.”

Though the employee argued that the school district’s sick leave policy and the CBA contained no definition of personal illness and did not clarify whether a significant medical condition is necessarily and substantively distinguishable from a personal illness, the district court relied on Ohio contract law to presume that this undefined phrase took its ordinary unambiguous meaning. It also recognized that Usher syndrome “could qualify as a ‘personal illness’” that allowed the employee to take sick leave if her symptoms made her unable to work, said the appeals court, noting that the district court thought that the “indirect connection” between her absence and her disease did not suffice to make the training a “personal illness” and the employee failed to call this reasoning into doubt.

Disclaimer. The appeals court, however, noted that the parties overlooked that the policy allowed the employee to use sick leave “for absence due to personal illness[.]” Pointing out that the prepositional phrase “due to” means “because of,” the court stated that it “could see a claim that [the employee’s] Usher syndrome (a personal illness) qualified as the ‘but for’ cause of her absence because she undertook the training due to her disease.” But because the employee did not raise this theory, she forfeited it. “And under the party-presentation principle,” the court explained, “we cannot raise the argument on our own initiative. Yet we flag the argument so future parties do not read this opinion as impliedly resolving it.”

The case is No. 25-3548.

Judge: Murphy, E.

Attorneys: Marc D. Mezibov (Law Offices of Marc D. Mezibov) for Andrea Tumbleson. John C. Albert (Amundsen Davis) for Lakota Local School District and Lakota Local School District Board of Education.

Companies: Lakota Local School District; Lakota Local School District Board of Education

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