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Smith v. Burbank Unified School District
California Court of Appeal, Second District, Division Eight · 2026 · Published opinion (PDF)
Summary for general education only—not legal advice. This is not a Workplace Rights Advocacy case result. See Case Results for the firm’s own verdicts and settlements.
A published California Court of Appeal decision about religious accommodation under the FEHA and employer COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Douglas Smith, a Burbank Unified School District chemistry teacher since 1992, is a devout Christian whose faith led him to refuse the vaccine the District required of all staff in fall 2021. The District granted every exemption request it received, including Smith’s, but barred unvaccinated employees from campus. Five exempted employees in isolated office jobs were allowed to keep working with twice-weekly testing, plastic barriers, masking, and distancing. No exempted teacher was allowed to teach in person; Smith and the others with frequent in-person contact were offered only an unpaid leave of absence. Smith asked to keep teaching with masking and PCR testing instead, and his appeal and internal complaint were denied. After about a year on unpaid leave, he took a teaching job at a school without a mandate and later resigned from the District. He sued for religious discrimination, failure to prevent discrimination, and retaliation. The Los Angeles Superior Court granted summary judgment for the District, and the Court of Appeal affirmed.
Everyone agreed Smith made a prima facie case, so the only question was the District’s defense under Government Code § 12940(l)(1): that it explored available accommodations but could not accommodate his belief without undue hardship. Smith argued that involuntary, indefinite unpaid leave can never be a reasonable accommodation, pointing to the FEHA regulation (Cal. Code Regs., tit. 2, § 11062(a)) stating that an accommodation is not reasonable if it requires segregating an employee from customers or the public. The court rejected that literal reading. Unpaid leave eliminated the conflict between his religious practice and the vaccine requirement, he kept the right to return once the mandate ended, and the U.S. Supreme Court in Ansonia Board of Education v. Philbrook recognized that unpaid leave can be a reasonable religious accommodation. On undue hardship, Smith offered no evidence to contradict the District’s declarations about classroom coverage, state supervision requirements, and the “major operational impacts” of its hybrid reopening. His claim that one more unvaccinated teacher posed no meaningful hardship was, in the court’s words, “argument, not evidence.” Because the District treated all exemption requests the same way, the failure-to-prevent and retaliation claims fell with the discrimination claim.
In plain English: when an employer can show with real evidence that the accommodation a worker wants would cause undue hardship, California courts may accept unpaid leave as a reasonable religious accommodation, at least where the leave removes the conflict and the job stays open for the worker’s return. Workers challenging that kind of decision on summary judgment need evidence, such as proof that comparable employees were treated differently or that the employer’s claimed burdens were not real, rather than argument alone. This decision is a contrast to the Ninth Circuit’s Weiss v. Permanente Medical Group, which addressed whether a worker gave adequate notice of a religious conflict, not whether the employer’s accommodation was reasonable. Related practice pages: religious discrimination, failure to accommodate, and teachers.
Related: Religious Discrimination · Failure to Accommodate · Discrimination Claims · Retaliation Claims · Teacher Employment Lawyers · Government Employees · Burbank Employment Lawyers