Advocating for children with disabilities was Victoria DeLano’s dream. And after 15 years of advocacy work, she got her dream job at the U.S. Department of Education in December.
Three months later, she was fired.
The first sign that she had been fired came on Feb. 12, when she could no longer log into her computer at the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). She had no idea why, and neither did her boss. She later got a phone call from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management notifying her of her termination.
“I did get a phone call from someone at the Department of Ed saying ‘We don’t have a letter of termination for you, because we didn’t terminate you,’” DeLano said in a phone interview Thursday. “‘OPM did this.’”
DeLano said she had no proof of her termination in a LinkedIn post written on Feb. 18. In the Thursday interview, she said she only received a termination notice six days after being locked out of her computer because she asked for it. The letter did not cite a reason for her termination, even though she was a probationary employee.
Under federal employment law, a probationary employee is someone who has been employed for less than two years. Those employees can only be fired if they have low performance or any conduct issues. DeLano said she did not fall under either category.
“I have protections as a probationary...
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