Virginia School Board To Pay $575,000 in Settlement for Teacher Fired Over Pronoun Dispute
The teacher attempted to compromise by using the student’s new name, but school officials mandated he use of the preferred pronouns.
A Virginia school board has agreed to a $575,000 settlement in damages and attorneys’ fees to a former high school teacher dismissed for not using a transgender student’s requested pronouns.
The settlement reached this week also includes policy changes and the expungement of the teacher’s termination from the record.
West Point School Board’s decision comes nearly a year after the Virginia supreme court reinstated teacher Peter Vlaming’s lawsuit, which was supported by a Christian legal organization, Alliance Defending Freedom.
“Peter wasn’t fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn’t say. The school board violated his First Amendment rights under the Virginia constitution and commonwealth law,” ADF’s senior counsel, Tyson Langhofer, said, according to UPI.
The legal battle began in September 2019, when ADF attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Vlaming, who had been dismissed in 2018 after seven years of teaching for failing to use the student’s requested pronouns, which he claimed were “inconsistent with the student’s sex.”
Mr. Vlaming had attempted to compromise by using the student’s new name, but school officials mandated that he stop avoiding the use of the pronouns in question.
“I loved teaching French and gracefully tried to accommodate every student in my class, but I couldn’t say something that directly violated my conscience,” Mr. Vlaming said. He asserted that his termination was wrongful and based on his religious beliefs.
“I was wrongfully fired from my teaching job because my religious beliefs put me on a collision course with school administrators who mandated that teachers ascribe to only one perspective on gender identity — their preferred view,” he said.
In December, the Virginia supreme court sided with Mr. Vlaming, declaring that the school administrators had infringed upon his rights to freely exercise his religion. “Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, no government committed to these principles can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs,” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority opinion.
