Hobdy

MEMORANDUM **

Waymon Hobdy, Jr., appeals the district court’s partial summary judgment and its partial Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal in Hobdy’s Title VII action against the Los Angeles Unified School District (“LAUSD”) and several of its employees. Hobdy, a former assistant principal and current teacher for LAUSD, alleged race and gender discrimination, retaliation, a hostile work environment, and state-law intentional infliction of emotional distress (“IIED”). The IIED claims against all parties and the Title VII claims against the individual defendants were dismissed on the Rule 12(b)(6) motion. The district court dismissed the remaining claims on summary judgment. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291 , and we affirm.

We address first the summary judgment rulings. The district court did not err in granting summary judgment on Hobdy’s Title VII discrimination claims. To survive summary judgment under Title VII, Hobdy had to adduce a triable issue of fact that LAUSD’s justifications for demoting Hobdy were merely a pretext for discrimination. Stegall v. Citadel Broad. Co., 350 F.3d 1061, 1066 (9th Cir.2003). Because Hobdy had not passed the district’s Administrators’…

concurring in part and dissenting in part:

I concur in the court’s affirmance of the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) dismissal of the California state law claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress. However, although it is a close case on the question whether the Title VII discrimination claims should have been resolved by summary judgment, I respectfully dissent from the court’s affirmance of that decision by the district court. I conclude that there is a genuine issue of material fact on the issue of pretext if we consider the totality of circumstances, accept all of Mr. Hobdy’s factual assertions as true, and give him all reasonable inferences from them in support of his claims.

Most significant for me are the immediacy and frequency thereafter of Principal O’Riley’s criticisms of Hobdy in his new role as an assistant principal, that O’Riley on at least one occasion gave Hobdy a dressing down in front of other teachers, and that, although it might be reconciled by reference to different school-district needs or different decisionmakers, Hob-dy’s loss of the assistant principal job carried with it more hardship than the comparable loss faced by Farrell.…