A Fort Worth English teacher who was fired after tweeting President Donald Trump and asking him to crack down on immigration at Carter-Riverside High School won her appeal Monday.
Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath ruled Georgia Clark is entitled to get her job back, along with back pay and employment benefits from the time her contract was not renewed. Or, instead of reinstatement, the school district may pay her one year of salary.
“It appears the commissioner ruled the way he did based on a technicality and we are exploring all of our options,” said Barbara Griffith, a spokeswoman for the school district. “This is all we are going to say right now as we have not yet had a chance to review and analyze the entire decision.”
Clark’s tweets earlier this year ignited a national backlash. After her firing in June, she argued that the First Amendment protected her ability to tweet the president.
Morath ruled Monday that she was right.
Clark’s attorney, Brandon Brim, didn’t immediately respond to a request for a comment.
Under state law, the school district has 20 days to ask for a hearing, based on a specific issue it feels was overlooked. If that request is filed, the TEA would have 45 days to make a ruling on that request.
Beyond that, any further appeal would come in the form of a lawsuit in district court.
WHAT HAPPENED
Earlier this year, several tweets asking Trump to crack down on immigration at Carter-Riverside High School were sent from a Twitter account using Clark’s name. One tweet asked the president to help remove “illegals from Fort Worth.”
Clark told a district investigator she thought the messages were private direct messages to Trump, not public posts.
“Mr. President, Fort Worth Independent School District is loaded with illegal students from Mexico,” one of the posts linked to her account stated. “Carter-Riverside High School has been taken over by them.”
The Twitter account, @Rebecca1939, has been deleted.
Clark was put on administrative leave in May after the school district was alerted to her Twitter posts to Trump.
By June, Superintendent Kent P. Scribner recommended Clark be terminated for using racially insensitive language and abusing social media. The Fort Worth school board unanimously supported that decision.
An independent hearing examiner in August recommended that the Fort Worth school board reinstate Clark, saying that her job termination was not justified.
The school board in September rejected that recommendation and instead upheld the earlier decision to terminate Clark’s continuing teacher contract for good cause under Chapter 21 of the Texas Education Code. Clark appealed that decision to Morath.
THE RULING
Morath’s ruling states that the case raises several questions about First Amendment law.
The school district argued that Clark, by signing a contract with the school district, waived her First Amendment rights, according to the document.
The school district, Morath’s ruling said, “is mistaken.”
Clark’s contract “does not waive her right to contact, outside of the workday, elected officials concerning matters they have jurisdiction over,” the ruling stated. “But while teachers retain free speech rights, these rights are not unlimited.”
Morath noted that a school board is required to make decisions that include “findings of fact and conclusions of law.” While the Fort Worth district rejected conclusions of law found by the independent examiner, it didn’t propose any new ones.
“If a school board wants to change conclusions of law, the school board needs to actually draft new or changed conclusions of law and to provide a real explanation of the change,” the ruling states.
In the end, Clark was under contract with the Fort Worth school district and the district fired her because of her tweets to the president. Clark argued that her tweets are protected by the First Amendment, according to the ruling.
An independent hearing examiner reviewed the case and didn’t agree with the school district’s decision.
“We stand by our decision because we firmly believe this is in the best interest of all students,” Scribner said Monday night.
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/education/article237399459.html
Call a spade a spade in that illegals are taking over Fort Worth schools and you’ll get fired.
Can’t gripe about the invasion or you’ll loose your job.
Not much of a loss (for us), considering that their REAL job is to brainwash the sheeple’s children into being good little so-called ‘government’ slaves (citizens).