ITHACA, N.Y.—Tompkins County Whole Health terminated Vincent Sears on Dec. 18 with no explanation. At the time, he was the county’s only Black mental health counselor. The situation has prompted the county to open an investigation into Sears’ termination.
Sears had been working for the county in its division of mental health as a counselor for about two months. After wrapping up his last appointment of the day on Dec. 18, Sears’ supervisors told him it would be his last day on the job.
Sears said he asked, “Why? What did I do?” and was told, “‘We’re not going to talk about that.’ But I was like, I don’t understand.”
“‘It’s okay,’” Sears said he was told. “‘This is hard for everybody involved.’”
Sears said he was never given an explanation, and neither was the union that represents the county’s mental health counselors.
Since starting with Tompkins County, Sears said he had received generally positive feedback from his supervisors and hadn’t received any warnings about job performance. His sudden termination came after working more than a decade as a counselor. He has nearly completed a Ph.D in Counseling Education Supervision.
With no explanation, Sears said being let go “doesn’t make any sense,” and has created ongoing financial problems for him.
But Sears said he thinks his termination is because he was the only Black counselor working in the county’s mental health clinic at the time. He described an office culture in which he experienced a range of what he called microaggressions and “flippant comments” about race.
“We talked about representation when I got hired,” Sears said. “Either they’re out of touch, or they don’t understand the value that I brought.”
Chantalise DeMarco, executive vice president of CSEA Region 5, the union that represents the county’s mental health counselors, called Sears’ termination “very unusual.”
DeMarco said there are few avenues for the union to seek a resolution for Sears, since he was a probationary employee at the time of his termination. Sears was too early into the job to have the protection of the union, DeMarco said, and his supervisors had the right to fire him without cause.
DeMarco, who has worked for Tompkins County as a casework assistant in its mental health division for nearly 30 years, said she had never seen an employee let go in the way Sears was, particularly a probationary employee.
“I can probably count on my hands how many employees [in the county’s mental health division] have actually been terminated, let alone been terminated under 90 days,” DeMarco said.
Union officials requested that the county administration conduct an investigation into Sears’ termination, and evaluate if there was any underlying discrimination. DeMarco said the county agreed to do so on Dec. 19, 2023.
Tompkins County Communications Director Dominick Recckio told The Ithaca Voice in an email that “as a general practice Tompkins County does not provide comment on personnel matters.”
“The county takes any allegations of discrimination seriously and we are looking into this complaint as we do similar matters,” Recckio said.
As of the publication of this article, Sears said that he has not been contacted by a representative from the county.
Sears said soon after he was hired, his supervisors, without consulting him, appointed him as a representative to two different county work groups focused on developing and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives within the county’s workforce.
A seat on the boards was an opportunity to promote his values, but Sears said he was “taken aback” that his supervisors would appoint him without first consulting him.
In the weeks he spent working for the county and serving on the DEI boards, Sears said his supervisors did not attend some required DEI meetings. Sears said he was discussing some of the work he was doing on a board with a supervisor in a one-on-one check-in meeting, when she openly dismissed the county’s DEI efforts.
“She’d be like, ‘What are they even doing?’ And ‘I don’t even know why we have to have these meetings. I don’t know why the committee even exists,’” Sears said.
The choice to appoint Sears to boards focused on DEI without asking him “tokenizes his presence there, in my opinion,” DeMarco said.
“Being a male of color in this field is very rare, and is something we need to develop, and with all of the things reported, we are not taking that to heart,” DeMarco said.
The county’s mental health services are predominantly staffed by white women, according to DeMarco, which she called a norm of the field.
A colleague of Sears at the Tompkins Mental Health Division, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of workplace retaliation, said, “I don’t know what grounds they could possibly have fired him on.”
After Sears was terminated, the former colleague said several patients approached them to ask what happened to Sears, or express unsolicited appreciation for his work.
“Many patients — mutual patients that we had shared in the short tenure that he had there — had indicated, both that it was really great to have a man of color on the team and also how helpful he had been,” the colleague said.
Sears said shortly after his termination, he learned his supervisors sent letters to his colleagues and clients stating that he had left his position.
Sears said he had already scheduled sessions with his clients before was let go, and was deeply troubled by how the news of his departure was delivered to his clients.
“The letter — it basically stated I quit,” Sears said. “But what that does is tell somebody that has abandonment issues [that] your therapist just left you even though I’ve scheduled with everybody for the following week.”
One letter to Sears’ clients stated that he had “left his position” and advised patients that their “case will be assigned to a new clinician.”
Sears said six of his clients had been long term patients of his who had followed him to the Tompkins County division of mental health from his previous employment at Family & Children’s Service of Ithaca, where he worked for over two years.
DeMarco, the union official, said she had never seen anything like the letter that Sears’ clients received following his termination. Similar letters have not been the department’s standard practice during her tenure, she said.
As of this article’s publication, Sears said he has not yet been able to receive unemployment benefits.
Recckio, the county’s director of communications, said that Sears’ claim was submitted on Jan. 2, but that the county was not notified of the claim until Jan. 16, when Sears contacted the HR department.
The Ithaca Voice reviewed an email Sears received from a Tompkins County HR employee on Jan. 17, responding to his Jan. 16 message, notifying him that the county had responded to his claim that day.
Sears said in his email to the county he was told by a representative at the New York State Department of Labor that it was waiting on a response from Tompkins County in order to process his claim.
Regardless of the outcome of the internal county investigation, Sears said he does not intend to return to his previous role if given the opportunity. He said he also intends to file a complaint with the New York State Department of Labor against the county over his firing and how he was treated on the job.
“I’m not the story. I am just one of many stories about the mistreatment of Black and brown people in the helping profession,” Sears said.