Fired teacher asks SCOTUS to stop schools from punishing educators for conservative memes

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.

Like Hedgepeth's posts, Bergonzi's posts on illegal immigration and race included vulgarity, specifically curse words in two of the seven he was shown, though neither's Facebook page identified them as employees of their respective districts.

Unlike District No. 211, Barnstable Public Schools conceded Bergonzi's posts caused no disturbance, just one email from a "concerned colleague" that prompted the district to review his posts. Yet it fired him two months after hiring Bergonzi with no official reason, though Superintendent Sara Ahern told him his posts didn't reflect the district's values, the suit says.

It alleges First Amendment retaliation, breach of at-will employment contract and causing him "substantial reliance damages" by representing Bergonzi wouldn't be hired unless he passed the social media review, leading him to quit his "tenured" job in a different district.

A Tennessee jury just gave a school district a slap on the wrist for punishing a student's out-of-school speech, an anticlimactic end to the two-and-a-half-year-old lawsuit that looked like a slam dunk based on a SCOTUS precedent for a profane cheerleader.

Tullahoma City Schools violated the First Amendment rights of "I.P." by suspending him three days for posting silly memes that punctured then-Principal Jason Quick's self-serious presentation at school, the jury found Thursday, but awarded the former student $1 in nominal damages, finding the violation caused him no injury. 

It's a victory for "any high school student who wants to express themselves online about school without fear of punishment," Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression attorney Conor Fizpatrick, who represented I.P., said in a statement. "Our client’s posts caused no disruption, and what teens post on social media is their parents’ business, not the government’s."

While all but one of I.P.'s claims were previously dismissed and individual defendants removed, his suspension expunged and the social media policy under which he was punished repealed, Fitzpatrick told The Tennessean the trial was still important to "establish that school administrators do not act as a 24/7 board of censors" over students' private lives.

Fight Floyd rioters with a sewage 'pressure cannon'

Last summer, the 7th Circuit said it was "irrelevant" whether Hedgepeth's Floyd posts were "racist or racially inflammatory," emphasizing District No. 211 "produced unrefuted, objective evidence of significant disruption of workplace operations." 

While she set her Facebook account to private before and after the posts and declined friend requests from current Palatine High School students, the ruling said Hedgepeth estimated 80% of her Facebook friends were former students, so it was unsurprising the posts caused "substantial disruption among current students and faculty and at school board meetings."

The 7th Circuit called it Hedgepeth's third strike, following suspensions in 2016 and 2019 for profane outbursts in class, in which she was warned termination was an option. The district "reasonably concluded that the scope and intensity of the disruption created an insurmountable barrier" to the approaching academic year's learning environment.

Judicial Watch's SCOTUS petition emphasizes Hedgepeth is not a cookie-cutter conservative. The 20-year social studies teacher "sponsored the Gay, Straight Alliance … organized and moderated forums where students and staff could discuss sensitive issues like sex and gender" and produced a diversity video shown to the whole school in 2020.

Never initiating but only accepting friend requests from former students, Hedgepeth said she didn't want to come back from vacation because "the civil war has begun" – referring to the Floyd riots – but that "I need a gun and training" before she would move. She reposted a meme on how to end the riots, with a sewage "pressure cannon."

When a long-graduated former student told Hedgepeth on Facebook to "shut up with your white privilege," she responded, "I find the term ‘white privilege’ as racist as the ‘N’ word," recommended reading black conservatives and said blacks commit half of America's murders and are 30% of abortion victims, which "might be a subtle genocide."

Rectify Justice Thomas complaint about lower courts ignoring precedent

The furor over Hedgepeth's social media was driven by people without a connection to the school, the petition says. Only three of 76 "unique emails" were from current Palatine students and six from their parents, one of the former and four of the latter supporting Hedgepeth, and the "lone written communication from a fellow teacher" also supported her.

Of the remaining emails, "a large chunk of them were based on templates that appear to have been part of an organized effort led by a local activist who was considering running for the school district’s board," as a school board member emphasized, and outsider outrage against Hedgepeth lasted for only one school board meeting, the petition says.

The board fired her at the next meeting, with the notice of charges specifying her "racially charged" views were the problem and "inconsistent with the values the District upholds." Officials individually called her a racist, yet nothing happened to a board member who kept sharing inflammatory progressive views on social media, Judicial Watch said.

The trial court said the district's interest in addressing the disruption Hedgepeth supposedly caused outweighed her "hyperbolic or satirical social media posts and a back-and-forth discussion with a friend," which were not "serious" or "significant" public commentary. The 7th Circuit said "specialized expertise or knowledge" was protected, but not "jokes."

SCOTUS must take the case to rectify Justice Clarence Thomas's complaint, when it refused to hear another public-employee meme case, that lower courts are flagrantly misapplying its First Amendment precedents on "controversial political speech," the petition says.

"Indeed, this case is the ne plus ultra of using vague claims of disruption to punish political speech that is far removed from the classroom temporally, geographically, and topically," with the 7th Circuit sanctioning punishment that no one disputes was based on "core political speech on her private Facebook page over summer vacation," Judicial Watch said.