A former Western Washington University employee has filed a lawsuit against the school alleging it failed to provide reasonable accommodation for her disability and then treated her differently than a similarly situated colleague. Teri Hall filed the complaint on July 30, 2026, in federal court, roughly a year after WWU eliminated her position as a program specialist in the College of Business and Economics. WWU has until August 24 to respond to the claims.
What the Lawsuit Alleges
According to the complaint, Hall had been working from home for approximately two years under a disability accommodation that Western Washington University had previously approved. The nature of her disability is not specified in publicly available reporting, but the fact that the university had already granted a remote work accommodation for two years is central to her legal argument: it establishes that WWU had already recognized her need for accommodation and had found a workable solution before the position elimination disrupted that arrangement.
When her position in the College of Business and Economics was eliminated, Hall says she accepted a comparable role with the university's Woodring College of Education. However, the school ultimately told her she could not hold that position because she was unable to perform in-person fingerprinting duties, which it deemed an essential function of the job. Hall argues that the fingerprinting requirement was used as a pretext and that the school had options to accommodate her that it declined to explore. She says she continued working with WWU to find a suitable open position but was repeatedly told either that the university could not accommodate her disability or that she was not qualified for available openings. That sequence of events, a previously accommodated employee who loses her position through no fault of her own and is then told no other accommodation is possible, forms the narrative core of her complaint.
The central allegation in the lawsuit is that the school later took the fingerprinting duties away from a Woodring College employee who was on maternity leave and reassigned them to someone else, something the university had explicitly refused to do for Hall. That comparison sits at the core of the discrimination claim: if WWU was willing to reassign the fingerprinting duties for one employee under certain circumstances, Hall's attorneys argue, the refusal to do the same for a disabled employee raises serious questions about equal treatment under the law. The comparison to the maternity leave situation is legally significant because it tends to undermine the university's characterization of fingerprinting as a non-negotiable essential function. Functions that can be reassigned for one employee can generally be reassigned for another, and courts look carefully at whether employers are applying essential function designations consistently.
Hall is seeking an unspecified amount of damages for emotional pain and suffering. The complaint does not include a specific dollar figure for the claim.
Western Washington University's Response
Western Washington University had not responded to media requests for comment as of the time the lawsuit was first reported by the Bellingham Herald. The school has until August 24 to file a formal response to the complaint in court. WWU is a public university governed by Washington state and is generally required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as state disability discrimination statutes, which apply to public employers. Public universities that receive federal funding, as WWU does, are also subject to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits disability discrimination by federally funded entities and predates the ADA by nearly two decades.
Disability accommodation disputes in university settings often turn on the legal question of what constitutes an "essential function" of a job. Employers have latitude to define essential functions, but courts scrutinize those definitions closely when disabled employees argue that the designation is being used to justify denial of accommodation rather than reflect a genuine operational necessity. Job descriptions, the frequency with which a duty is actually performed, the consequences of not performing it, and whether other employees have been asked or allowed to perform it in the past are all factors courts examine when evaluating essential function claims. Whether in-person fingerprinting was truly essential to the Woodring College position, or whether that function could have been reassigned as it apparently was for the employee on maternity leave, is likely to be a central factual question in the litigation. The outcome will depend heavily on the specific evidence WSDOT and both sides present about how the position actually operated day to day.
Context at Western Washington University
Western Washington University, located on Sehome Hill in Bellingham, is one of the largest employers in Whatcom County, with several thousand faculty and staff. The university enrolls around 15,000 students and operates multiple colleges including the College of Business and Economics and the Woodring College of Education, both of which are named in this lawsuit. Woodring College is WWU's educator preparation college, and its programs require background checks and fingerprinting for students placed in K-12 school settings, which is the likely operational context for the fingerprinting duties at issue in this case.
The Hall case is not the only active legal matter involving educational institutions in Whatcom County. Earlier this summer, a former Bellingham Technical College student filed a lawsuit against that institution over injuries sustained in a welding class in 2023. The Blaine School District also faces two federal lawsuits related to its handling of reported sexual assaults involving juvenile students. Taken together, these cases reflect a period of heightened legal scrutiny of educational institutions in the county across a range of issues from workplace accommodation to student safety.
Disability rights in the workplace are governed at the federal level by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on the organization. The interactive process, a good-faith dialogue between employer and employee about what accommodations might work, is a required component of ADA compliance, and courts have found employers liable when they cut off that process prematurely or refuse to consider alternatives. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforces ADA workplace protections and offers guidance for both employees and employers on accommodation requirements. Employees who believe they have experienced disability discrimination can also file charges with the Washington State Human Rights Commission at hum.wa.gov. For the latest on developments at Western Washington University, the WWU website provides official news and announcements. Court filings in the Hall case will be publicly accessible through the federal court electronic filing system as the litigation proceeds.
