VA School Board Agrees to Pay $575K to Teacher Who Was Fired in Pronoun Policy Faith Fight

A Virginia school board has agreed to pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys' fees to a former high school teacher who was fired for refusing to use pronouns to refer to one of his students.

As CBN News reported, Peter Vlaming taught French at West Point High School in Virginia for nearly ten years. He was placed on administrative leave in 2018 after he objected to calling a biologically female student by male pronouns.

Initially, Vlaming tried to avoid using pronouns altogether and accommodate the student by using the student's new preferred masculine name. 

However, school officials directed him to stop avoiding the use of pronouns and to refer to the student using the pronouns inconsistent with her biological sex. 

Shortly afterward, the school board unanimously voted to fire the teacher after he "accidentally" used a feminine pronoun when referring to a student in class. 

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Vlaming sued the school board for violating his rights under the Virginia Constitution and commonwealth law stating in his lawsuit that his religion "prohibits him from intentionally lying" and that he "sincerely believes that referring to a female as a male by using an objectively male pronoun is telling a lie."

A lower court dismissed the case, but Vlaming appealed his case to the Virginia Supreme Court in 2021. Then the high court restored the lawsuit, ruling that Vlaming's rights were violated and the circuit court should not have thrown out the case.  

In writing the majority opinion, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey stated the court's review of this case "seeks to protect diversity of thought, diversity of speech, diversity of religion, and diversity of opinions." He noted that the nation is a Constitutional Republic and "cannot be true to itself" if it doesn't allow people participating in the public marketplace of ideas to use their conscience. 

"Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, no government committed to these principles can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs," Kelsey wrote.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a non-profit legal group, represented Vlaming and said 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."

"Peter wasn't fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn't say. The school board violated his First Amendment rights under the Virginia Constitution and commonwealth law," said ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom. 

The West Point School Board has agreed to settle the lawsuit. They will clear Vlaming's firing from his record and pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys' fees.

The board has also updated its policies to the new Virginia education policies established by Gov. Glenn Youngkin that uphold fundamental free speech and parental rights.

"I was wrongfully fired from my teaching job because my 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," Vlaming said. "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."

"I'm very grateful for the work of my attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom to bring my case to victory, and hope it helps protect every other teacher and professor's fundamental First Amendment rights," he added.