Mercer Community College Settles Employee’s Discrimination Lawsuit For $300K

MERCER COUNTY, NJ — Mercer County Community College has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit from a longtime employee who alleged she was underpaid and repeatedly passed over for promotions because of her race and disability.

The college’s board of trustees approved the settlement with Shana Burnett on Sept. 23, according to a board resolution and a copy of the settlement agreement. The settlement was first reported by Transparency NJ.

Under the agreement, Burnett will receive $200,000 as compensation for alleged emotional distress, and her attorneys will receive $100,000 in legal fees. Payment was due on or before Sept. 25, which the agreement set as her final day of employment at the college.

The college did not admit to any wrongdoing. The board resolution states the college agreed to the deal “solely as a business decision” to avoid the cost and uncertainty of a trial.

The board made the decision “based purely on economic and expenditure factors due to the ongoing cost of defending such claim,” the resolution states.

The Lawsuit

Burnett filed her complaint in state Superior Court in Mercer County on April 17, 2024. It named the college, its board of trustees and Robert Kleinschmidt, the college’s dean of liberal arts, as defendants.

The complaint brought four counts under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination: unequal pay, race discrimination, disability discrimination and retaliation.

“From the date of Plaintiff’s hire, Defendants paid her substantially less than her non-Black counterparts, even though she had the same or better experience and education, and performed the same job duties and responsibilities as her counterparts,” the complaint states.

Burnett, who was 49 when the suit was filed, started at the college on April 30, 2001, as an administrative specialist at the James Kerney Campus in Trenton, with a starting salary of $22,500, according to the complaint. She moved to the West Windsor campus’s liberal arts division in 2006.

By the time she filed suit, her salary had grown to $59,738, plus a $3,000 yearly longevity bonus under her union contract, the complaint says.

The lawsuit compared her career to that of a white colleague who started in the same division about four years earlier at a higher salary. That colleague was promoted to executive assistant around 2005 and was earning $71,834 when she retired in June 2023, according to the complaint.

Both women came to the college with the same credentials, but Burnett went on to earn associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the complaint says.

Burnett asked to be promoted to executive assistant starting in 2008 and applied for more than 25 executive assistant and other higher-level positions, but was never promoted beyond senior administrative specialist, according to the suit.

Extra Duties, No Raise

The complaint says Burnett took on more work over the years without extra pay. That included managing the division’s budget, handling grant budgets and contracts and taking over the duties of a coordinator who resigned in 2018.

In 2019, Kleinschmidt gave her an outstanding performance review and recommended a reclassification and a 5 percent raise, according to the complaint. The recommendation said the reclassification would be “consistent with the duties that Ms. Burnett has assumed over the past three years that are above and beyond her current role.”

She received the new title, but the college denied the raise, the suit says.

The complaint alleges Kleinschmidt kept assigning her an executive assistant’s work and accused her of insubordination when she asked why she wasn’t given that title. In September 2020, a human resources official determined she should be made an executive assistant and receive a pay adjustment, but neither happened, according to the suit.

After Kleinschmidt returned to the liberal arts division in August 2021, he moved Burnett to a different area, gave her “unfamiliar and menial tasks,” and became “hyper-critical of her,” the complaint alleges.

Medical Leave & EEOC Complaint

Burnett went on medical leave in September 2021, according to the complaint. Before she could return, the college sent her for an exam with its own occupational doctor in January 2022. That doctor recommended moving her to a different position because of the work environment, but the college refused, the suit says.

She returned to work in February 2022. In June 2022, she filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging race and disability discrimination and retaliation, later adding age discrimination.

The next month, the college gave union members an equity raise. Some received as much as $7,000. Burnett received $200, according to the complaint.

In May 2023, the college’s new human resources director transferred her out of liberal arts to the Educational Opportunity Fund program. She kept the same title and received an extra $1,000, the suit says.

The complaint said she had gone “nearly 23 years of excellent performance and handling duties far outside her title and paygrade” without a promotion.

Terms Of The Deal

Beyond the payment, the settlement requires Burnett to resign or retire and bars her from seeking a job at the college again.

The agreement includes confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, and the college agreed to give only a neutral reference listing her dates of employment and positions held. The college also agreed not to contest her application for unemployment benefits and to support her application for retirement through the state’s Public Employees’ Retirement System.

In the agreement, the college “denies the allegations of unlawful conduct” and “continues to deny any and all liability.” The agreement calls the deal a compromise “to buy the Parties’ peace.”

Once payment is received, Burnett will file to dismiss the case with prejudice, according to the agreement.

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