Rae v. Woburn Public Schools, 113 F.4th 86

Amy Rae, a school nurse at Woburn Public Schools (WPS) since 2005, alleged years of retaliatory harassment by her principal and other administrators due to her advocacy for students with disabilities and complaints of her own mistreatment.
Rae described ongoing negative treatment since at least 2011, including adverse employment actions like unwarranted discipline, denial of promotion and transfer, and a hostile work environment, primarily by her supervisor, Carl Nelson.
On November 17, 2022, Rae filed suit asserting claims under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, Title II of the ADA, Massachusetts’s Chapter 151B, and for intentional infliction of emotional distress, after formally complaining to state discrimination authorities in April 2022.
The district court dismissed her complaint for failure to state a plausible claim, finding her claims were either untimely or insufficiently pled.
On appeal, the key legal questions were the timeliness of Rae's claims under statutes of limitation, the applicability of the continuing violations doctrine, and whether the alleged harassment was both retaliatory and sufficiently severe or pervasive under the relevant standards.
The First Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal for other reasons, principally concluding that only two recent incidents were timely, but did not meet the threshold for severe or pervasive harassment.

Issue	Plaintiff's Argument	Defendant's Argument	Held
Application of the continuing violations doctrine	Alleged long pattern of related retaliation	Each adverse act discrete; cannot aggregate	Doctrine inapplicable; discrete acts time-barred
Timeliness of claims under statutes of limitations	Claims should reach back due to continuous acts	Only timely claims under 3-year (ADA/504) and 300-day (151B) windows are actionable	Only conduct after relevant cutoff dates actionable
Sufficiency of pleadings for causal connection	Complaint plausibly alleged retaliatory motive	No plausible link between protected activity and adverse action	Court should have accepted plausibility standard but plaintiff failed on severity/pervasiveness
Severity or pervasiveness of harassment	Two timely incidents plus context suffice	Incidents not sufficiently severe or pervasive	Two incidents post-cutoff not severe or pervasive; claim fails

Nat'l R.R. Passenger Corp. v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101 (2002) (distinguishes discrete acts from hostile environment claims and limits continuing violations doctrine)
Noviello v. City of Boston, 398 F.3d 76 (1st Cir. 2005) (hostile work environment must be severe or pervasive)
Dressler v. Daniel, 315 F.3d 75 (1st Cir. 2003) (discrete discriminatory acts are time-barred even if related)
Shervin v. Partners Healthcare Sys., Inc., 804 F.3d 23 (1st Cir. 2015) (retaliation accrues with tangible effect and employee's notice)
Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998) (isolated incidents insufficient for hostile work environment)
Bhatti v. Trs. of Bos. Univ., 659 F.3d 64 (1st Cir. 2011) (negative job action must affect conditions of employment)