(The Hill) – A Virginia school board has agreed to pay a former high school teacher more than $500,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees as part of a legal settlement after the instructor’s dismissal in 2018 for refusing to use a transgender student’s pronouns.
The West Point School Board agreed Monday to pay Peter Vlaming, a former French teacher, $575,000 to settle a lawsuit brought against the Richmond-area school board by Vlaming and the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The board also cleared the dismissal from his record and, separate from the settlement agreement, changed its policies to conform to model transgender policies finalized by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration last year, the ADF said in a news release.
The model policies, which have been sharply criticized by LGBTQ advocacy groups and touched off a flurry of student-led protests when they were unveiled in 2022, allow teachers at Virginia K-12 schools to refer to transgender students by the name and pronouns associated with their sex assigned at birth, rather than their gender identity.
“Peter wasn’t fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn’t say,” ADF senior counsel Tyson Langhofer said.
In a statement, Vlaming said he was wrongfully terminated because of his religious beliefs, which “put me on a collision course with school administrators who mandated that teachers ascribe to only one perspective on gender identity — their preferred view.”
The settlement follows a December ruling by Virginia’s Supreme Court that reinstated Vlaming’s case after a lower court dismissed it. The state’s highest court wrote that the Old Dominion State’s constitution broadly protects freedom of speech and religion and allowed Vlaming’s claim that the school board violated his free exercise rights to proceed to trial.
“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,” Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority opinion.
Vlaming sued the West Point School Board and administrators at West Point High School, where he taught for six years, in 2019 after he was fired for not using the pronouns of a transgender student. Vlaming in his lawsuit said he tried to accommodate the student by using his chosen name and avoiding the use of pronouns altogether, but the student, identified in court documents as John Doe, his parents and the school told Vlaming that he was required to use the student’s male pronouns. Doing otherwise, they said, violated the school district’s anti-discrimination policies.
West Point Public Schools Superintendent Larry L. Frazier Jr. did not immediately return The Hill’s request for comment but told The Washington Post Monday that the district was pleased to have reached a resolution with Vlaming “that will not have a negative impact on the students, staff or school community of West Point.”
“Our focus is on all students, and our goal is to continue to build positive relationships throughout our school division community,” Frazier told The Post.