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 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.
