In Rizvi v. Loudoun County School Board, No. 1:25-CV-307-MSN-IDD, 2025 WL 3514256 (E.D. Va. Dec. 5, 2025), the court, inter alia, granted defendants’ motion to dismiss plaintiff’s hostile work environment claims based on age, race, color, national origin, and religion.
From the decision:
Defendant further seeks to dismiss Plaintiff’s claims of hostile work environment under Title VII, Section 1981, and ADEA. “To establish a hostile work environment under any of these three Acts, plaintiff must allege conduct that was (i) unwelcome; (ii) based on a protected class; (iii) sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the terms or conditions of plaintiff’s employment; and (iv) imputable to [his] employer.” Sarraj v. N. Va. Elec. Coop., 2022 WL 2820553, at *8 (E.D. Va. 2022) (collecting cases). Relevant to the requirement that the conduct must be “severe or pervasive” are “the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; its severity; whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance.” Okoli v. City of Baltimore, 648 F.3d 216, 220 (4th Cir. 2011). The “status of the harasser may [also] be a significant factor” because “a supervisor’s power and authority invests his or her harassing conduct with a particularly threatening character.” Sonnier v. Diamond Healthcare Corp., 114 F. Supp. 3d 349, 356 (E.D. Va. 2015).
To begin, Plaintiff’s ADEA hostile work environment claim fails because the only conduct that bears any relation to his age (Ms. Bennett’s referring to his age in class “several” times, ECF 8-1 at 2 ¶ 25, and stating he was “too old to be acting like this,” Am. Compl. at PageID# 38) is not objectively severe or pervasive. Assuming that Bennett’s comments are imputable to Defendant,30 they comments constitute “callous,” “offhand,” or “rude treatment” by a coworker, but they amount to “isolated incidents” that do not bear the force required to “permeate[ ] [a workplace] with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult” as to alter the terms and conditions of employment. Evans v. Int’l Paper Co., 936 F.3d 183, 192 (4th Cir. 2019).
The claims of hostile work environment founded upon Plaintiff’s other protected characteristics—be that race (Asian), national origin (Pakistan), color (Brown), or religion (Muslim), ECF 8-1 at 2—fare little better. Most of the alleged conduct is either couched in conclusory terms or again has no nexus to Plaintiff’s membership in a protected class.31 Plaintiff also fails to plead an imputable action in the student bomb threat, as while student harassment “can form the basis for a viable claim … if the harassment is severe,” Webster v. Chesterfield Cnty. Sch. Bd., 2020 WL 6064352, at *3 (E.D. Va. Oct. 14, 2020), Plaintiff must also show that the school board “knew of the harassment and failed to take appropriate remedial action.” Berger-Rothberg v. City of New York, 803 F. Supp. 2d 155, 165 (E.D.N.Y. 2011); Twine, 755 F. Supp. 3d at 978-79 (“Effective action requires the employer ‘to take prompt remedial action reasonably calculated to end the harassment.’ ”). Plaintiff, however, does not suggest that the student’s harassment continued after he was placed in a different classroom such that Defendant’s response was ineffective—only that he continued to feel unsafe regardless. See Bazemore v. Best Buy, 957 F.3d 195, 202–03 (4th Cir. 2020) (co-worker conduct not plausibly alleged as imputable because discipline was reasonably calculated to end harassing behavior and in fact did so—“so long as the discipline is reasonably calculated to end the behavior, the exact disciplinary actions lie within [defendant’s] discretion”). Finally, the remaining conduct of (1) Defendant subjecting Plaintiff to “inappropriate questioning when seeking to start his Muslim Cultural Bridges Club,” (2) an instructor projecting an image of a church during a planning session and employees placing church materials in Plaintiff’s mailbox, (3) administrators not taking seriously Plaintiff’s complaint of two swastikas drawn in his classroom, and (4) Ms. Bennett’s insulting of Plaintiff including calling him a “Paki,”32 is also largely devoid of factual detail and in any case, is not so frequent, threatening, or interfering to plausibly amount to a severe or pervasive environment.
Based on this, the court held that dismissal was warranted.