Virginia school board to pay teacher $575,000 after firing over transgender pronouns

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CNA Staff, Oct 3, 2024 / 12:10 pm (CNA).

A school board in Virginia will pay a teacher more than half a million dollars after he was fired for refusing to use a student’s transgender pronouns. 

The legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), representing Peter Vlaming in the dispute, said in an announcement this week that the West Point School Board “has agreed to pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees” to the teacher. 

Vlaming was dismissed by the West Point School District, about one hour east of the state capital of Richmond, in 2018 after he refused to use male pronouns to refer to a female student who believed she was a boy.

Vlaming had ”tried to accommodate the student by consistently using the student’s new preferred name and by avoiding the use of pronouns altogether” before his dismissal, ADF said. He sued the district in September 2019 over the firing, which he said violated his religious rights as an Anglican Christian. A lower court dismissed the suit, but in 2021 Vlaming appealed his case to the Virginia Supreme Court, which subsequently reinstated the case. 

“Peter wasn’t fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn’t say,” ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer said in the announcement. 

“The school board violated his First Amendment rights under the Virginia Constitution and commonwealth law,” Langhofer said.

Vlaming “was passionate about the subject he taught, was well-liked by his students, and did his best to accommodate their needs and requests.” But “he couldn’t in good conscience speak messages that he knew were untrue, and no school board or government official can punish someone for that reason.”

Vlaming in the announcement said his 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.”

“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,” he said, adding that he hopes the ruling “helps protect every other teacher and professor’s fundamental First Amendment rights.”

In addition to the payout, the school district will also change its policies to conform to new Virginia education rules the state put in place last summer. 

Those rules affirmed that parents in the state enjoy broad oversight of their children while enrolled in public school. They stipulate that parents exercise broad discretion over whether or not a child is permitted to present as a member of the opposite sex, including whether or not the child adopts new pronouns at school.

Parents also have control over whether or not their children are permitted to undergo “social transition” to a different “gender” at schools and whether or not the child “expresses a [different] gender” while in school.