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By Dr. Bob Uttl
This blog is about School District No. 5 Southeast Kootenay (SD5) and their use of psychologists’ opinions—Dr. Todd Kettner, Dr. Mary Westcott, and, drumroll please, Dr. John Braxton Suffield—to keep an experienced Canadian woman, Ms. T, out of the classroom and to eventually fire her simply because of her average IQ and average cognitive skills.
SD5 apparently believed, or at least adopted, the opinions of their hired psychologists that being an average Canadian woman amounts to a mental disability. In doing so, SD5 also used differential minimum IQ and cognitive ability standards for teachers based on their age, sex, race/ethnicity, and education. That is, they adopted a position that, for example, a younger teacher must possess greater attention abilities than an older teacher. Taken to its logical conclusion, to the extent to which attention abilities matter, younger teachers would only be permitted to lose, say, one child per year on field trips, whereas older teachers could lose five children per year. Similarly, SD5 adopted the position that how many kids a teacher is allowed to lose on field trips is determined by a teacher’s skin color. When asked whether it struck him as odd that a Canadian woman of average intelligence was deemed unfit to teach, Mr. Brent Reimer, SD5 Director of Human Resources, replied: “No, I never gave it a second thought, honestly.” Read Average IQ Canadian Women Unfit to Teach: The Suffield-Reimer IQGate in School District Non. 5 Southeast Kootenay.
The Origins of My Involvement
As I wrote in one of the early stories on this site:
I met Ms. T in the fall of 2015 at a small party. I learned that after many years of teaching in School District No. 5 Southeast Kootenay (SD5), Ms. T’s teaching was suddenly put under a microscope. To cut a long story short, Ms. T was walked out of the classroom at the end of the day on May 10, 2010, and forced to undergo a series of psychological assessments for reasons unknown. The assessments concluded that Ms. T was a Canadian woman of average intelligence and cognitive abilities. However, two of the assessors, Dr. Mary Westcott and Dr. J. Braxton Suffield, opined that Ms. T’s average IQ score and average cognitive abilities prevented her from performing her elementary school teacher duties. As a professor of psychology and an internationally recognized expert in cognition, memory, aging, psychometrics, and psychological measurement, I was nothing short of flabbergasted. I asked Ms. T to send me the reports and promised to look them over.
Bob Uttl, March 4, 2025
Read the full Introduction here.
My astonishment at the truly stunning incompetence of Dr. Mary Westcott and Dr. John Braxton Suffield led directly to my involvement in this matter. Eventually, it led to me representing Ms. T in what has now become an over 10-year-long litigation battle, with over 40 days of hearings spread over 5 years, before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.