I remember how it was -- JR
‘I Would Like to Have My Job Back’: School Counselor Sues After Being Fired for Disagreeing With Transgender Policy
PENDLETON, Ind.—An Indiana school district violated a guidance counselor’s right to free speech by retaliating against and ultimately firing her for saying parents should know about their teenage children’s interest in “transitioning” to the opposite sex, the former counselor argues in a lawsuit filed Thursday.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that protects religious liberty and represents veteran high school counselor Kathy McCord, says in the lawsuit that South Madison Community School Corporation in Pendleton, Indiana, had no authority to tell McCord who she may speak to after hours and off school property.
ADF also contends that McCord’s religious rights as a Christian were trampled by the South Madison school district, specifically her closely held value that parents should be involved in important decisions regarding their children.
“I would like to have my job back; I would like to go back to school,” McCord, a guidance counselor for 25 years at Pendleton Heights High School, said Wednesday in an interview with The Daily Signal. “I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else. It’s terrible what they’re doing to parents. And I really wasn’t ready to retire, so I’d like to go back to work.”
After The Daily Signal exposed the South Madison school district’s hidden policy of supporting students’ gender transitions without necessarily informing parents, the school board fired McCord on March 9 for confirming the policy’s existence. Some school board members, however, later changed their stated reasons for terminating her multiple times.
The school district’s so-called Gender Support Plan required McCord to instruct teachers to withhold information regarding “gender changes” from some parents based on a student’s say-so. That provision prompted teacher Amanda Keegan to resign in protest.
“When I had to look at that parent, and feel like I was lying to that parent …, I was sick to my stomach. I can’t lie to parents. I can’t do that again,” Keegan told The Daily Signal in an earlier interview.
Speaking Wednesday to The Daily Signal, McCord said that South Madison’s actions forced her to comply with decisions that negatively affected students and their families.
“By not working with parents, [the district’s Gender Support Plan] harmed the students,” the former counselor said.
After an investigation lasting over three months, the South Madison school board voted unanimously to fire McCord, amid boos and jeers from the audience at its March 9 meeting. In support of McCord, T-shirts worn in the bipartisan crowd of parents and teachers read: “Keep Kathy.”
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” one parent told the board.
Alliance Defending Freedom filed the lawsuit on McCord’s behalf in the Indianapolis-based U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
ADF argues that the South Madison school district violated both the U.S. Constitution and the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires government entities to prove that every contested policy is “the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.”
ADF points out in the court filing:
South Madison and its employees told Mrs. McCord that she had no choice but to comply with the Gender Support Plan policy and threatened her with adverse employment action if she chose not to comply, telling her that South Madison would treat noncompliance as insubordination.
South Madison cannot demonstrate that the Gender Support Plan policy is the least restrictive means of furthering any interest it might have; instead, South Madison could have, for example: allowed Mrs. McCord to refrain from using pronouns to which she objects while simultaneously avoiding pronouns that a student has requested not be used; allowed her to use nicknames; or, transferred Mrs. McCord’s students with a Gender Support Plan to one of the other school counselors who doesn’t share her objections.
As a result, South Madison cannot demonstrate that [its] Gender Support Plan policy is ‘the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.’
In requiring teachers, counselors, and other school system staff to speak in highly specific terms that go against their political and religious beliefs, ADF maintains, South Madison is complicit in compelling speech:
By requiring Mrs. McCord to participate in the Gender Support Plan policy, including by socially transitioning students and hiding some students’ social transition from their parents, South Madison has compelled Mrs. McCord to speak its viewpoint on a matter of public concern.
“Mrs. McCord had no valid official duty to participate in students’ social transition, or hide it from parents,” Vincent Wagner, senior counsel in ADF’s Center for Parental Rights, told The Daily Signal.
“[It’s] so important to highlight [that] we know kids do so much better when parents are involved with their lives,” Wagner added. “Both the social science data and common sense are clear—kids need their parents’ help, especially in difficult situations.”
In a statement to gathered parents after the school board voted to fire McCord, board member Buck Evans accused her of falsifying documents sent to The Daily Signal.
Evans apparently was referring to the school system’s secretive Gender Support Plan, which McCord had confirmed but not provided to The Daily Signal.
The school board shared no evidence of any falsification of documents, and its “fact-finding” sheet provided to local news reporters contained different reasons for firing McCord than those suggested by Evans and board President Mike Hanna.
Email timestamps and additional evidence provided from The Daily Signal revealed that the statements made by Evans are false, although the South Madison school district continues to refuse comment to any news outlet concerning the discrepancies.
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The escalating madness of woke dogma on college campuses
Once an arena of dueling beliefs, colleges have been taken over by a woke left agenda that will tolerate no dissent.
Just a few weeks ago, on the campus of San Francisco State University, Riley Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer, was nearly mauled by an angry group of protesters who took issue with her message that biological men have no place in women’s sports.
She was chased down a hallway and practically held captive, all because she had the audacity to stand up against the left-wing mob.
The administration of San Francisco State never offered the 23-year-old swimmer an apology. Instead, it sought to cast her as the aggressor.
In a statement released by the University’s president, Lynn Mahoney, she described Riley’s presence on campus as “deeply traumatic” for the trans community and chose to commend — rather than condemn — the SFSU student body for exercising their so-called right to free speech.
America’s college students didn’t learn to be ideological bigots overnight — revulsed by the ideals of freedom of speech and expression.
But they learned over time and they learned by example, from professors such as Shellyne Rodriguez, who until her termination Tuesday evening served as an adjunct professor at Hunter College, a public college that is a part of the City University of New York system.
In footage posted onto Twitter by Students for Life of America, Rodriguez is seen tearing into a group of anti-abortion students who had been tabling in an academic building.
She accuses them of spreading “f–king propaganda” and engaging in violence, only moments before proceeding to push their anti-abortion materials onto the ground and walking away.
There was once a time when college campuses existed to be the battlefield of ideas, where discourse was welcome and differences of opinion were championed.
If even today’s college professors have lost sight of that, how can we be surprised that America’s young people have as well?
Contrary to her claim, it wasn’t the anti-abortion students who chose violence in that video. It was Rodriguez.
Days later, she held a machete to the neck of a New York Post reporter.
Rodriguez didn’t just choose violence.
She chose bigotry; she chose suppression.
She chose intolerance.
Everything her progressive dogma claims to be against.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/23/escalating-madness-of-woke-dogma-on-campus/
*************************************************A Collegiate Renaissance?
Intelligent observers of American higher education know that colleges generally are in great trouble: falling enrollments, declining public and political support, often dubious outcomes, and excessive tuition and other costs. Most depressing, the traditional tolerance of widespread viewpoints and commitment to free expression seem to have declined substantially.
While one finds a few encouraging stories dealing with these issues at existing colleges and universities, the overall picture is bleak. It seems that current institutions are doing too little, if anything, to fix the problem. At many, the outlook is palpably worsening.
In the competitive, free-market, private-business sector, lags in innovation or qualitative improvement are remedied by Schumpeterian “creative destruction” and by new competition. Hence Eastman Kodak has nearly died in photography and Tesla has prospered in automobiles as a consequence of changes in technology and taste.
So, too, can new entrants into the collegiate market potentially help to reverse the declining higher-education industry in America. I recently attended a summit of higher-education thinkers and philanthropists sponsored by the new University of Austin (UATX). UATX will admit its first class in the fall of 2024, but it is already doing a number of academic activities—for example, running short summer seminars for crackerjack students at other schools—as a trial run for a future as a full-fledged university.
It is not an ordinary group of academics who are leading UATX’s inception. The founding president, Pano Kanelos, was the former president of the “great books” college St. John’s (Annapolis and Santa Fe). Prestigious academics like Charles Calomiris (Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University) are taking pay cuts to join, full-time, the management and instructional team at UATX.
Others at the meeting who are assisting in the creation of the institution included the brilliant historian Niall Ferguson (Stanford and Harvard), John Tomasi (until recently at Brown, now running the Heterodox Academy), and the award-winning Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who gave a stirring address to the audience. It is my understanding that former Princeton classicist Joshua Katz will be joining the faculty.
It’s an academic dream team.
While UATX has a long-term goal of being a serious university like Princeton or Chicago, with thousands of students, it will probably open next year with a high-quality freshman class of 100-200. All students will study, together, a common curriculum for the first two years, reviewing in detail the evolution of modern civilization and developing the tools to help advance it in the future. During their last two years, students will branch out into more advanced study in specialized fields.
The school plans to break with convention in a number of ways.
For one thing, there will be no faculty tenure. Nor will there be any constitutionally planned parliamentary bodies at UATX (i.e., faculty and student senates), as is common at most schools. But there will be an adjudicative council (an academic judiciary) to resolve the inevitable occasional brouhaha.
First and foremost, as the school’s mission statement (which has undergone exhaustive review, including by the attendees at the conclave) clearly proclaims, is UATX’s “commitment to the pursuit of truth” and its appreciation of vigorous but civilized debate fostered within “an environment of intellectual pluralism.”
The school has already amassed an impressive group of entrepreneurs and philanthropists committed to creating more than another Texas-centric liberal-arts institution but, rather, a national, indeed international, respected innovator in higher education.
At a reception at the estate of board chair and high-tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, I saw some of the best and brightest names in American capitalist innovation mingling with an equally distinguished group of academics (including professors from schools not mentioned above—for example, the University of Chicago). There were scientists and classicists, artists and economists.
Yet all believe, as I do, that American higher education is broken and that reform within current institutions is problematic. There are too many vested interests that will fiercely fight efforts at improvement .
One huge problem is the lack of intellectual diversity and tolerance of alternative perspectives on campus. Another, older problem is the vast inefficiency in the system (UATX vows to have a lean administrative structure, including no DEI apparatchiks). Some schools overly obsess over ball-throwing contests (i.e., football or basketball). Nationally, grade inflation has contributed to a decline in work effort, diluting the traditional American virtue of excelling at near-impossible tasks. The list of academic sins is long, and starting new institutions initially free of those sins strikes me as a good idea.
Yet it may not be enough, particularly given the huge role played by governments, especially the Washington bureaucracy, in American academic life. Educrats on Maryland Avenue in D.C. (home of the U.S. Department of Education) issue rules that submissive university executives obey and often enthusiastically embrace, such as ones dictating how colleges should handle issues relating to allegations of student sexual misconduct. These rules are often fundamentally out of sync with Anglo-American jurisprudence dating back to the Magna Carta.
It seems to me that, currently, there is an implicit contract between the mainline higher-education establishment (represented by organizations such as the American Council on Education or the Association of American Universities), their rent-seeking schools, and the federal government.
The Feds, now represented by the Biden Administration, will bail out the universities (through, e.g., pandemic-related funds) in return for support in the form of leftish ideas, personnel (to run government bureaucracies), and campaign contributions from faculty and staff. Growing political uncertainties potentially jeopardize that implicit Unholy Alliance, and a Republican takeover of government might lead to an even bleaker future for traditional colleges and universities, improving the prospects for new innovations like the University of Austin.
Another issue may be accreditation. As I have elsewhere argued, accreditors are cartels that restrain entry into the realm of higher-education services. UATX will either have to obtain institutional accreditation or try to innovate by saying, “We don’t care about accreditation,” a gutsy but certainly not risk-free approach. At this point, accreditation is still an undecided question for the new institution’s officials.
American exceptionalism has evolved out of new ideas and innovations that occur by taking risks. UATX is in that tradition, and my impression is that it should be taken very seriously.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14510&omhide=true&trk=rm
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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