OUTRAGEOUS: Teacher Fired for Being Conservative? | Judicial Watch

➡ Judicial Watch talks about how a teacher named Carrie McRae was fired from her job because of her social media posts criticizing certain teaching methods, even though she made these posts before she was hired. She was also campaigning for a school board position in a different district at the time. A group called Judicial Watch is helping her fight this in court, arguing that she was unfairly targeted for her conservative views. They believe that the school used her posts as an excuse to fire her, which they see as a threat to teachers’ freedom of speech.

Boy, that’s a loophole they can drive a truck through to smash the First Amendment rights of public school teachers, even as constrained in the way I’ve discussed. What I also love about judicial watch, it’s not just here in Washington, DC, that we do this heavy lifting. We do work throughout the nation. We talk about the case we brought in California for Ashley Babbitt. We’ve got election integrity cases right now, Illinois and Mississippi.

More are coming in that regard, by the way, and litigation all over the country related to the rights of teachers and parents. Right, including a teacher up in Massachusetts who before she was hired, had posted critical comments of the race based obsessions of the left. And they used that, in my view, as a pretext to retaliate against her and fire her for that. And we lost at the lower court level because, you know, the law kind of makes it, makes it difficult to overcome the ability of school districts to sue teachers.

I mean, to fire teachers for speech because the standard typically is, now, this is, this is my understanding of it. So it’s not, it may not be a perfect legal description of the issue is that they have a lot of discretion. They think that it’s going to interfere with the school operations and the ability of the teacher to teach. They can get rid of the teacher. And we’re saying all of that was really, all those arguments were not made in good faith, and they just targeted her because she said conservative things.

So we had an oral argument on appeal before the first Circuit, which is the circuit court of Appeal at the federal level that handles cases for Massachusetts. She was fired, as we say, in retaliation for posts on social media that predated her employment at the high school, that she was working at Hanover. McRae was high at her, by the way, the teacher’s name is, I don’t want to get it wrong because she’s our client, Carrie McRae.

Now, Carrie was hired as a high school teacher on August 31, 2021, but she was fired over several TikTok posts that were made months prior to her hiring at the school. I think she was running for, like, a school board position. So some of that may have been campaign related. McRae, who was in May 21, well, she was, she was elected in May of 2021, was elected to the Berne school committee.

Bourne and she made the post in her personal capacity as a citizen and candidate for public office. McRae posted a TikTok video which stated in part, now I’ve been banned from TikTok, by the way, so I can’t go to TikTok and look at the video, maybe I can, but I’ve been banned from TikTok, and our client got fired for posting a TikTok video. So be warned. So pretty much the reason I ran for school board and that the reason I’m taking on this responsibility is to ensure that students in the least, at least in our town, are not being taught critical race theory, that they’re not being taught that the country was built on racism.

So they’re not being taught that they can choose whether or not they want to be a girl or a boy. It’s one thing to include, it’s one thing to be inclusive, and it’s one thing to educate everybody about everything, but it’s completely another thing to push your agenda. And with me on the school board, that wouldn’t happen in our town. Does that sound like a big deal to you? Sounds to me like a straightforward, modest, moderate criticism of the left’s agenda.

And as we argue in our brief, I think at the appellate level, Hanover public schools fired McRae because a political speech she posted online months before she even became employed at the high school. In addition, the speech did not concern Hanover public schools. Completely unrelated, as she did not live in Hanover and was campaigning for a school committee position in a district 45 minutes away. I forgot about that.

You know, you know, when we’re working on these cases and our lawyers are working on the cases, I see these details in the pleadings and our press statements and such. And then, you know, this was two years ago, and the case we went through discovery, but then I kind of go back through in our press releases when we have developments, and I’m like, boy, that reminds me. This was so outrageous.

So I’m kind of like you. I get outraged again when I’m reminded of things even within judicial watch, right? I mean, I’m outraged all the time, but then I’m reminded of things we’ve already uncovered, especially with our clients, and I get really mad. Nor did any student, parent, or teacher at Hanover public schools raise issues about our client continuing to teach at the high school. The school’s sole excuse for firing her was that the school administrators believed that if she continued teaching at the high school, her unrelated pre employment speech would cause a disruption.

So it wasn’t like it had caused a disruption. They worried it might. Boy, that’s a loophole they can drive a truck through to smash the First Amendment rights of public school teachers. Even as constrained in the way I’ve discussed, the district court found in favor. This is the lower court of the school district. It concluded the Hanover Public Schools prediction of disruption was reasonable. McRae’s challenging ruling on four grounds.

First, the First Amendment. The First Amendment employment retaliation standard does not apply to unrelated pre employment speech. Second, a mere prediction of disruption is insufficient to outweigh a committee, an employee’s interest in engaging in political speech. Third, the reasonableness of that prediction is a question for a jury and is not appropriate for summary judgment. So what does that mean? It meant let the jury decide. The judge shouldn’t just make a ruling outright that it’s reasonable as a matter of law.

Fourth, the district court incorrectly found that the Hanover Public school’s prediction of disruption was reasonable. The district court’s ruling should be reversed and the case should be remanded. So we have audio of the hearing. I don’t think, I don’t think we have anything set to play, but you can listen to it. We’ll provide a link to the hearing audio, and I don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

As I said, this is going to be a tough nut to crack, but maybe the judges will agree with us, the appellate judges will agree with us, and we’ll win. So let’s pray for that. We already had settled a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of another Massachusetts school teacher and parent, David Flynn, who was removed from his position as head football coach after exercising his right as a parent citizen to raise concerns about critical race theory.

So, you know, critical race theory and dei or woke theories are still being taught in our schools. Parents need to be able to speak out against it without fear of retaliation. And certainly school teachers should be able to talk about these issues that are in the public sphere without fear of getting fired. Don’t you agree? But we’ll see what happens. It’s interesting because now there are a bunch of left wing teachers who have been fired over comments they made as it relates to the israeli conflict with the terrorists in Hamas.

So you’ve had these pro Hamas teachers getting fired and they’re kind of making these same arguments. Are they going to get vindicated? And if so, will that apply to folks like McRae? It’s going to be very interesting to see how that plays out. So once again, I’ll let you know how it plays out. So stay tuned to hear. Keep on coming back to our weekly update. And as you can see, we keep on doing the heavy lifting on topic after topic on issue after issue on issues.

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