National
Teacher who refused to use preferred pronouns gets big settlement
Vivian Geraghty sued the Jackson Local School District in 2022, and the settlement was reached last month, the New York Post reported over the weekend. She was aided in her suit by Alliance Defending Freedom, which released a statement to NBC4 late last week.
“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,” said Logan Spena, legal counsel for ADF. “The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power, and Jackson Local School District officials have learned that comes at a steep cost.”
Geraghty said in her lawsuit that she was told to resign from the district’s middle school language arts position. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled in August that being forced to use preferred pronouns and names or face disciplinary action amounted to “compelled speech.”
The court also found that the school’s “pronoun practice was not neutral.”
In its own statement, Jackson Local Schools told NBC4 that it “remains dedicated to navigating complex and changing legal environments in a manner that prioritizes student “safety and well-being.”
In August 2022, on the first day of school, two students asked Geraghty to call them by different names than appeared on school information. Geraghty said she knew the names were “part of the student’s social transition” but declined to accommodate them due to her religious beliefs. She also said she “wanted those students out of her classroom.”
ADF argued that the school did not offer Geraghty other alternatives, such as moving her to a different classroom or allowing her to address the students by their last names.
The Ohio teacher who resigned after refusing to use students’ preferred pronouns and names will receive a $450,000 settlement from her school district.
