‘Whack! Ow!’ Spanking Whistle-Blower Wins $200K in Discrimination Suit

News of a $200,000 federal jury verdict in a unusual employment discrimination suit is gathering traction on the blogosphere. Filed by a municipal worker who says she was fired after she blew the whistle on a relative spanking a child in a Chicago Park District restroom, the case started with a call by the district's South Shore Cultural Center to the mother of a 6-year-old boy.

His aunt responded, and, after hearing a series of "whack! ow!"s outside the center's restroom one day in 2006 as the aunt allegedly smacked the boy there to discipline him, Cathleen Schandelmeier-Bartels took action. A woman who admittedly feels strongly that all forms of corporal punishment of children are wrong, she contacted a state child-protection agency and reported the incident as an alleged beating, recounts Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell.

"If someone else other than me had been outside that bathroom that day, I doubt that the incident would have been reported," Schandelmeier-Bartels now tells Mitchell.

As a result of this 2006 child-abuse report, contends Schandelmeier-Bartels, she lost her job as a program coordinator at the cultural center.

And, she argued in a subsequent federal lawsuit, her firing was based on race discrimination: She was criticized at work for making the child-abuse report, she says, and a supervisor—who, like the aunt and the boy in the cultural center's largely black neighborhood, is African-American—allegedly told Schandelmeier-Bartels, who is white, that the method of discipline used by the aunt is, essentially, "a black thing," according to Mitchell's column.

A federal jury apparently agreed with Schandelmeier-Bartels' analysis of the situation, awarding her $200,000.

A spokesman for the Chicago Park District contends she was fired "for lack of administrative ability to run the summer camp," Mitchell writes. At last report, the district hadn't yet decided whether to appeal the verdict.

The case has captured the attention of Overlawyered, among other blogs.