Sarah Barbour, has served as the Director of the Marietta Student Life Center since November 2021. She has filed a lawsuit against the Marietta City Schools district and Dr. DeMarcos Holland, the MCS Chief Human Resources Officer and former Marietta High School interim principal for discrimination and retaliation.
If an employee believes they have been discriminated against based on their race, gender, age, religion, disability, or other protected characteristic, they may choose to sue their employer without fear of retaliation.
The MSLC provides students with a safe space to receive counseling, mentoring, academic tutoring, and post-secondary planning. Dr. Rona Roberts previously served as the director of the MSLC for four years before Barbour took over. However, upon taking over Dr. Robert’s responsibilities, Barbour asserted that one of the programs run by the MSLC was mismanaged and she reported the situation to district leadership, which resulted in an audit of practices that the lawsuit claims were in place under Dr. Roberts’ leadership.
This is not to say that Dr. Holland, Dr. Roberts, and Barbour had not met to attempt to resolve these issues. However, the system and Barbour failed to come to terms with one another and the lawsuit claims she accused Dr. Holland of providing an abundance of support to Dr. Roberts, but he failed to support Barbour when she took over.
The lawsuit claims that funding for the MSLC was cut by the Marietta Board of Education because they didn’t like Barbour’s outspoken advocacy of the LGBTQ+ community. It also claims withholding opportunities that could have benefitted the Marietta Student Life Center and its students. It claims the program’s funding was cut, including 90 percent of the therapeutic programming and 75 percent of the non-therapeutic programming, which consequently left the MSLC unable to meet the needs of the students.
Another claim in the lawsuit is Dr. Holland used inflammatory and unfounded racial allegations against Barbour. It claims she received a lower score on her year-end evaluation on a particular category based on a race-related complaint from another Black employee. The claim further explains the Marietta Board of Education didn’t invite Barbour to participate in an end-of-year review of the Marietta Student Life Center, which Barbour argued that all other directors had been invited to in the past.
Furthermore, it claims that the School Board gradually began eliminating her duties as the director of the MSLC and planned on eliminating her position by the end of the school year and Dr. Holland encouraged Barbour to begin seeking employment outside of the MCS district.
Marietta High is a governmental entity and thus has certain protections for employees while filing legal claims. Therefore, there are a variety of legal requirements and procedures that need to be followed to ensure that the employee who is suing is able to keep their job. Barbour continues to hold her directorial position at the Marietta Student Life Center, despite her filing the lawsuit.
The school and district have not been transparent about the issue.
“The district does not comment on pending litigation,” Chris Fiore, the Chief Communications Officer for the District, said.
Only this ‘no comment’ was given as a response to formal inquiry.
“The school has kept quiet about the lawsuit, but a lot of students speculated that it was in response to the library’s book ban,” Anna Kinscherf (10) said.
Earlier this school year, Marietta City Schools deemed nearly two dozen books “sexually explicit” and removed them from the shelves of the Marietta High School library.The moves were approved by a 6-1 vote, with one board member opposed to both.
According to the Marietta Daily Journal, Superintendent Dr. Grant Rivera said, “I do not believe in any way any decisions made regarding the Student Life Center have anything to do with a child’s sexual orientation.”
Several people affiliated with the district, argued that the list of books banned from the library focused on themes and characters related to race and LGBTQ+ issues.
“Any suggestion … that the board or the district is not funding the Student Life Center, regarding the funds that had been provided and approved by the board to go to the Student Life Center, is simply not accurate,” Rivera said in the MDJ.
Since the district has not provided comment about the lawsuit, there in uncertainty about how the lawsuit will affect the following year concerning the MSLC and the students who rely on its services.
Services are being offered during the school day and after school. The Friday before spring break, the Student Life Center continued with their annual “Come and Get It” event, which prepares bags filled with snacks and other necessities that students may not have access to outside of the school day during the break.
“I think that it could’ve been possible to resolve the dispute without resulting in a lawsuit and it definitely wouldn’t have drawn as much attention to the school,” Kinscherf (10) said.
