Citation

Kopels S. Sch. Soc. Work J. 2023; 47(2): ix-xviii.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Lyceum Books)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

I am taking a break from writing about lawsuits that focus on school shootings (Kopels, 2022a, 2022b) to spotlight a recent lawsuit on names and preferred pronoun usage. This editorial will look at a new court case in which a middle school teacher sued her school district employer, claiming that she was forced to resign from her position because of her religious beliefs. In December 2022, Vivian Geraghty, a teacher for the Jackson Local School District (the District) in Massillon, Ohio, sued the District in federal court for allegedly forcing her to resign from her position as a middle school teacher at Jackson Memorial Middle School.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U. S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, alleges that, because of her religious beliefs, Geraghty was in effect fired when she refused to follow the District's policies regarding gender and pronoun use (Botos, 2022). The allegations of the complaint, as I describe them here, derive from the federal lawsuit filed by Ms. Geraghty (Geraghty v. Jackson Local School District Board of Education et al., 2022; subsequently referred to as Federal complaint). Geraghty's complaint was filed against four defendants: the District board of education, the superintendent, the curriculum director, and the middle school principal. Throughout this editorial, I identify the specific allegations made by the plaintiff (and later on by the defendants in their answer) by the paragraphs of the complaint (or the answer) from which they are drawn.

Language: en