An Ohio school district has agreed to pay $450,000 as part of a settlement with a teacher who was forced to resign for declining to affirm the “social transitions” of students seeking to identify as the opposite sex.
In a statement published Wednesday, the Alliance Defending Freedom announced that Jackson Local School District in Jackson Township had agreed to pay $450,000 in attorneys’ fees and damages to former teacher Vivian Geraghty after a federal judge determined that the school district had violated Geraghty’s First Amendment rights by forcing her to resign for declining to use a trans-identified student’s preferred name and pronouns.
“No school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job,” said ADF Legal Counsel Logan Spena in the statement shared with The Christian Post. “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.”
“The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power, and Jackson Local School District officials have learned that comes at a steep cost."
Spena expressed gratitude that “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.”
Following the settlement, Geraghty ended her litigation against the school district.
The settlement comes nearly four months after United States District Judge Pamela Barker of the Northern District of Ohio concluded that the school district had violated Geraghty’s First Amendment rights by engaging in free speech retaliation, compelling her to engage in speech against her will and infringing on her right to practice her religion freely.
Geraghty, who taught English at Jackson Memorial Middle School, was asked to resign at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year after maintaining that she would not call her trans-identified students by their made-up names and self-declared pronouns.
Geraghty first took her concerns about the demands to comply with accommodations for the “social transition” of her trans-identified students to her school's principal, who then brought in district administrators to engage in further discussions about their expectations of her as a school district employee.
Geraghty, who identifies as an Apostolic Pentecostal, and believes in the scientific reality that there are only two sexes, and that using names and pronouns that contradict a person’s biological sex violates her deeply held religious beliefs, rejected an offer by the school district to address trans-identified students by their chosen names and not their self-declared pronouns. When she described herself as “unwavering” on the issue, school district officials told Geraghty that “taking this stand would count as insubordination.”
While Geraghty resigned from the district, she contacted her teachers’ union two days later to determine if her rights had been violated. The teachers’ union told Geraghty that she had the option to rescind her resignation if she agreed to use trans-identified students’ chosen names and self-declared pronouns, but she ultimately declined that offer.
Geraghty is not the first teacher to face adverse action for declining to refer to trans-identified students by names and pronouns that do not align with their sex. Peter Vlaming, a former teacher in Virginia, was fired by West Point Public Schools in 2018 for refusing to kowtow to trans ideologues.
Vlaming reached a settlement with his former employer earlier this year when the Virginia school district paid $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees, and they agreed to remove his termination from his record.
