Attorneys representing Ohio teacher Vivian Geraghty at the legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) announced news of the substantial settlement in a Dec. 18 press release, stating that the Jackson Local School District would pay damages and attorney fees for violating Geraghty’s freedom of speech.
ADF had filed suit against the district in December 2022 over the dispute.
“No school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job,” stated ADF Legal Counsel Logan Spena in the release following news of the settlement.
“The school tried to force Vivian to accept and repeat the school’s viewpoint on issues that go to the foundation of morality and human identity, like what makes us male or female, by ordering her to personally participate in the social transition of her students,” Spena said.
“The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power, and Jackson Local School District officials have learned that comes at a steep cost,” she added. “Vivian resisted this unconstitutional demand and explained that her Christian faith made her unable to participate in her students’ social transition, and she has received just vindication for taking this stand.”
Geraghty was working as an English teacher at Jackson Memorial Middle School in the northeast Ohio city of Massillon when two students approached her asking that she use pronouns and names that were inconsistent with their biological sex in order to facilitate “social transition.”
Because of her firmly held Christian beliefs, Geraghty attempted to reach a solution with the school’s administration. However, the principal and the district’s curriculum director told her “she would be required to put her beliefs aside as a public servant” and that her refusal would “not work in a district like Jackson.”
When she refused to affirm the students’ “gender identity,” the district curriculum director “handed Geraghty a laptop and ordered her to draft her letter of resignation in the adjoining room for immediate submission,” according to ADF.
ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom, also condemned the district’s violation of Geraghty’s religious beliefs in an ADF press release at the time of the filing.
Geraghty wished to “avoid using her voice to validate ideas that violate her faith and jeopardize her students’ well-being,” Langhofer said at the time.
“Increasing evidence suggests that this approach may lead adolescents to unnecessarily pursue dangerous medical interventions like puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, or life-altering surgeries,” he pointed out.
“Vivian treated every student with equality and respect, and it was unlawful for school officials to terminate her employment.”
The payout comes several months after a similar ADF victory in which a school board in Virginia agreed to pay a teacher more than half a million dollars after he was fired for refusing to use a student’s transgender pronouns.