The Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced a lawsuit Tuesday against the Texas Education Agency (TEA) challenging its investigations into school officials it accuses of making “inappropriate” comments after the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
The teachers union alleges the First Amendment rights of hundreds of educators have been violated by the probes into social media accounts after Kirk was killed during a college campus event in September.
The TEA letter announcing the investigations “unleashed a wave of retaliation and disciplinary actions against teachers,” according to the AFT, which said teachers were reprimanded, put on administrative leave and in some cases even fired.
Though the state agency previously argued the educators violated the Texas code of ethics for teachers, the union said the probes were the result of an “impermissibly vague, overbroad” policy that tramples free speech rights.
“Somewhere and somehow, our state’s leaders lost their way. A few well-placed Texas politicians and bureaucrats think it is good for their careers to trample on educators’ free speech rights. They decided scoring a few cheap points was worth the unfair discipline, the doxxing, and the death threats targeted at Texas teachers. Meanwhile, educators and their families are afraid that they’ll lose everything: their livelihoods, their reputations, and their very purpose for being, which is to impart critical thinking,” said Zeph Capo, president of Texas AFT.
