SCOTUS Asked to Decide If Schools Can Punish Teachers for Off Duty Speech

By Greg Piper | Just the News

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.

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