A Kansas teacher will be awarded $95,000 from the school that suspended her for not using a student’s preferred pronouns.
Fort Riley Middle School math teacher Pamela Ricard sued the Geary County School Board for enforcing a policy that didn’t exist before her suspension and violating her rights. The incident occurred after Ricard referred to a student using the term “miss” followed by the student’s enrolled last name. Previously, a school counselor had informed her the student preferred a different first name than on record, and a classmate had said the student preferred he/him pronouns, despite being enrolled in the school as a female.
Officials opted to reprimand Ricard and suspend her for three days for violating its policy on bullying, despite the fact that the policy did not include any direction on preferred pronouns. A week after Ricard returned to work following her suspension, the board enacted a new policy requiring staff to refer to students by their preferred pronouns but strictly forbidding teachers from informing students’ parents about new names and pronouns.
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The policy was eventually revoked by the school amid the lawsuit to “avoid a preliminary injunction,” according to Ricard’s lawyer Joshua Ney, a partner at Kriegshauser Ney Law Group and an Alliance Defending Freedom Attorney Network member. A judge in the U.S. District Court in Kansas later ruled that the school had to halt the policy while the case proceeded.
“No school district should ever force teachers to willfully deceive parents or engage in any speech that violates their deeply held religious beliefs,” said Tyson Langhofer, an ADF senior counsel and the director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom, following the almost $100K settlement.
Ricard retired in May, with the school agreeing to issue a statement that she “was in good standing without any disciplinary actions against her.”
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It is unclear what the school’s latest policy on pronouns is.
