Oct. 1 (UPI) — A Virginia school board has agreed to pay $575K in damages and attorneys fees to a former high school teacher who was fired for refusing to use a transgender student’s requested pronouns.
In addition to Monday’s financial settlement, West Point School Board agreed to change its policies and clear teacher Peter Vlaming’s firing from its record. The agreement comes nearly a year after Virginia’s Supreme Court reinstated Vlaming’s lawsuit, which was filed by the 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,” said ADF senior counsel Tyson Langhofer.
ADF attorneys filed the lawsuit in September 2019, after Vlaming — who had taught in the district for nearly seven years — was fired a year earlier for failing to use a student’s requested pronouns that were “inconsistent with the student’s sex.” While Vlaming tried to accommodate the student by using the student’s new name, school officials ordered the teacher to stop avoiding the use of the requested pronouns.