MASSILLON, Ohio ( WCMH ) — An Ohio school district will pay $450,000 to a middle school teacher who resigned for refusing to address two transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns .
Jackson Local School District reached a settlement in December with the teacher, Vivian Geraghty, after she claimed in a 2022 lawsuit that her First Amendment rights were violated when she was told to resign from a middle school language arts position.
The agreement follows a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio in August that said forcing Geraghty to use students’ preferred names amounts to “compelled speech” and that the school’s “pronoun practice was not neutral.”
“The school tried to force Vivian to accept and repeat the school’s viewpoint on issues that go to the foundation of morality and human identity, like what makes us male or female, by ordering her to personally participate in the social transition of her students,” said Logan Spena, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that represented Geraghty.