Public employees may lose their First Amendment rights to express “controversial views while off the job” without suffering professional discipline without Supreme Court intervention, according to lawyers for a suburban Chicago teacher fired for Facebook posts about George Floyd’s death in 2020.Judicial Watch petitioned the high court to review a 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said the Board of Education of Township High School District No. 211’s interest in “avoiding disruption” from Jeanne Hedgepeth’s posts, which “predictably rippled throughout the community,” outweighed her right to speak on matters of public concern.
Though the Chicago-based appeals court emphasized her “vulgar, intemperate, and racially insensitive” posts included “jokes about excrement” and attracted “local and international media attention,” it waved off the district’s concession that she made them during summer vacation so they couldn’t disrupt classroom or extracurricular activities, Judicial Watch said.
“That is not a tolerable result for the 22 million public employees in America” and “risks creating a homogenized public work force,” the petition says. It’s especially bad in public education, conveying to students that “the only acceptable … role models” share the district’s views, Judicial Watch said, quoting SCOTUS in the praying-coach precedent Kennedy.
The public interest law firm, which triumphed at SCOTUS on Wednesday in an election integrity case, filed a similar lawsuit Jan. 8 against a Massachusetts school district that fired its new associate principal, John Bergonzi, for social media posts it repeatedly told him would be reviewed before he was hired, yet were only looked at a month into his tenure.
Like Hedgepeth’s posts, Bergonzi’s posts on illegal immigration and race included vulgarity, specifically curse words in two of the seven he was shown, though neither’s Facebook page identified them as employees of their respective districts.
Unlike District No. 211, Barnstable Public Schools conceded Bergonzi’s posts caused no disturbance, just one email from a “concerned colleague” that prompted the district to review his posts. Yet it fired him two months after hiring Bergonzi with no official reason, though Superintendent Sara Ahern told him his posts didn’t reflect the district’s values, the suit says.
It alleges First Amendment retaliation, breach of at-will employment contract and causing him “substantial reliance damages” by representing Bergonzi wouldn’t be hired unless he passed the social media review, leading him to quit his “tenured” job in a different district.
A Tennessee jury just gave a school district a slap on the wrist for punishing a student’s out-of-school speech, an anticlimactic end to the two-and-a-half-year-old lawsuit that looked like a slam dunk based on a SCOTUS precedent for a profane cheerleader.
Tullahoma City Schools violated the First Amendment rights of “I.P.” by suspending him three days for posting silly memes that punctured then-Principal Jason Quick’s self-serious presentation at school, the jury found Thursday, but awarded the former student $1 in nominal damages, finding the violation caused him no injury.
It’s a victory for “any high school student who wants to express themselves online about school without fear of punishment,” Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression attorney Conor Fizpatrick, who represented I.P., said in a statement. “Our client’s posts caused no disruption, and what teens post on social media is their parents’ business, not the government’s.”
While all but one of I.P.’s claims were previously dismissed and individual defendants removed, his suspension expunged and the social media policy under which he was punished repealed, Fitzpatrick told The Tennessean the trial was still important to “establish that school administrators do not act as a 24/7 board of censors” over students’ private lives.
