AUGUSTA – The Maine Human Rights Commission has ruled that Rainbow Federal Credit Union discriminated against Denise Cyr of Lewiston when a senior vice president cut Cyr’s job interview short based on Cyr’s perceived disability.

According to Cyr’s attorney, Kristen Aiello of the Disability Rights Center in Augusta, the case will move to conciliation, based on the finding of reasonable grounds that the credit union discriminated against Cyr. If that fails, Aiello said, Cyr “is planning on seeking remedies in court.”

Cyr came to the interview on crutches due to knee replacement surgery.

An attorney for the credit union agreed with most of Cyr’s account of the curtailed interview, according to the investigator’s report, and made no objection at Monday’s commission meeting, so the the commission affirmed findings in the report without discussion.

It’s a significant case, Aiello said, “because it’s hard for me to imagine a more able person at the time she was discriminated against. She was working a 40-hour-a-week job, was caring for her family and attending Andover College.” Cyr, who lives in Lewiston, graduated from Andover last spring.

She is “very much capable of doing the job as teller,” Aiello said, but “Rainbow Federal Credit Union didn’t look past her crutches.”

In interviewing a prospective employee, employers may, Aiello explained, “ask about essential functions of the job. They cannot ask if an individual has a diagnosis. They certainly can’t base an employment decision on prejudice, which is what happened here.”

“If Americans had disqualified FDR from serving based on his disability, we would have lost one of our greatest presidents. He ended the Great Depression and freed Europe from Nazi rule. All from his wheelchair,” Aiello said.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, acknowledged as one of the greatest minds in modern times, is mobility impaired, Aiello pointed out, and Beethoven was deaf.

These men all have something in common with Mrs. Cyr, Aiello said, “in that they have a disability”

Aiello said there was no question Cyr was capable of performing the job of teller, but this “goes beyond just the loss of rights as an individual. We lose opportunities as a society when we make snap judgments based on prejudice. There is a lesson in this for everyone.”

Cyr had applied for a job as a teller at the credit union last year, based on the recommendation of a bank employee who told her the bank was hiring. Cyr suffers from osteoarthritis, which causes loss of mobility and pain, and dates to a car accident when she was 8 years old. She had a recent knee replacement and needs another one, and the day before her interview, she had fallen and was sore.

When Cyr showed up for her interview using two crutches, the executive vice president asked Cyr whether she suffered from polio.

The interviewer asked Cyr whether she could stand for long periods of time. Cyr said she couldn’t, but her crutches wouldn’t prevent her from doing the required work, according to the report.

Cyr asked the woman whether she could sit as she had seen other tellers doing, but was told she would need to stand for eight hours a day.

The woman didn’t discuss details of the job’s functions and didn’t talk about accommodations the office could make for Cyr’s handicapping condition, the report said.

When Cyr asked about the possibility of sitting as a teller, the woman replied: “Unfortunately, this interview is over.” The woman thanked her for coming and said she was “sorry that it couldn’t work out,” according to the report.