When Teachers Stand Up for Kids

Can teachers be punished for protesting discrimination against students? The federal courts weigh in.

When Pamela Settlegoode realized that her special needs students weren’t getting a fair shake, she did what any decent teacher would do. She spoke up.

Unfortunately, it cost Settlegoode her job—until a jury stepped in and made things right.

Settlegoode, who was a first-year teacher in the Portland (Oregon) Public Schools, conducted physical education classes for students with disabilities in several district schools. Alarmed about the conditions under which she had to teach, she wrote to school administrators complaining that the facilities, materials, and equipment she was required to use often were inadequate and unsafe.

Settlegoode warned that the district might be in violation of federal disability law and compared the district’s mistreatment of her students to the discrimination once suffered by African-American students who were forced to take “a back seat on the American School bus.”

A jury later found that the district refused to renew her contract in retaliation for her complaints and that the reprisal violated her First Amendment rights. As compensation for her loss, the jury awarded Settlegoode a stunning $952,000 in damages. And the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in a landmark decision handed down in June. “Teachers are uniquely situated to know whether students are receiving the type of attention and education that they deserve and…are federally entitled to,” the Court wrote. It went on to emphasize that it is particularly important that teachers of special needs students be free to speak out because they may be “the only guardians of these children’s rights and interests during the school day.”

In a similar case, Decoma Love-Lane, an assistant principal in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sued her school superintendent, claiming that he demoted her in retaliation for complaining about racially discriminatory discipline practices at her school.

Love-Lane had frequently voiced her concern that a disproportionate number of African-American males were being sent to the “time-out room” where they were denied any instruction. The superintendent allegedly responded that it was “not her job to worry about the children;…it was her job to please her principal.”

Reversing a trial court ruling, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said earlier this year that Love-Lane’s comments were protected under the First Amendment. It is perfectly proper, the court ruled, for a teacher to advocate on behalf of an “underprivileged student” who’s been “warehoused in a time-out room,” because “[t]his student has been abandoned at the end of the road unless someone, like Love-Lane, is able to speak up for him.”

In yet another case, Roderick Jackson, the former head coach of a girls’ high school basketball team in Birmingham, Alabama, sued his school district, claiming he was removed as coach for complaining that his girls’ team had been denied equal funding and equal access to sports facilities and equipment in violation of Title IX. That’s the federal law that bars gender discrimination and requires public schools to provide girls with an equal opportunity to participate in sports.

Jackson represented himself in the lawsuit and failed to raise a First Amendment claim. Instead, he argued that the district’s reprisal violated his rights under Title IX. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed his case, holding that he couldn’t sue under Title IX because he himself was not the victim of sex discrimination.

In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Jackson’s case and will decide whether a coach or other school employee who endures retaliation for complaining about gen