In a win for parental and conscience rights, a California teacher fired last year for refusing to comply with the gender-fluid agenda won a $360,000 settlement agreement with the Jurupa Unified School District Board.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, tenured Jurupa Valley High School physical education teacher Jessica Tapia became the target of a campaign by pro-LGBT students to pore over and report to school officials her social media posts expressing conservative views on LGBT issues, leading to a “religious exemption” review in which she was asked about her willingness to allow male students in female lockers and withhold from parents signs that their children were suffering from gender dysphoria. Upon answering that she could not do so in good conscience, she was fired.
“Some of the allegations, the evidence they submitted for them, were literally Bible verses that I posted,” Tapia explained in an interview last February. “There were some like that, and then there were some where, obviously on my social media I voice how I live my life and my opinions and my beliefs. And so some of the allegations were that I was not calling students by their preferred gender or pronouns. Which was very interesting too because I had never had a student come to me … with, ‘Mrs. Tapia, I would like you to call me this.’ I’ve never even been in that scenario, yet they were making these claims.”
“I made sure to clarify, too, with this district personnel that were sitting across from me,” she added. “I looked them in the eye and I said, ‘Are you asking me to lie to parents?’ and they said, ‘Yes. It’s the law.’”
Now, the Washington Stand reported that the district has agreed to a settlement amounting to five times the median salary for a Jurupa teacher. The district is attempting to save face by stressing that the settlement does not contain any admission of wrongdoing on its part.
“Today’s settlement serves as a reminder that religious freedom is protected, no matter your career,” Advocates for Faith and Freedom attorney Julianne Fleischer said. “Jessica’s story is one of faithful courage. She fought back to ensure her school district was held accountable and that no other teacher has to succumb to this type of discrimination.”
“What happened to me can happen to anybody, and I want the next teacher to know that it is worth it to take a stand for what is right,” Tapia herself said. “Across the country, we are seeing teachers’ freedom of speech and religious liberty violated through policies that require them to forsake their morals. I want teachers to be confident in the fact that the best thing we can do for students is educate in truth, not deception.”
California law ostensibly protects parents’ “absolute right to access to any and all pupil records related to their children,” but the state Department of Education declares that “preserving a student’s privacy is of the utmost importance,” and that “(d)isclosing that a student is transgender without the student’s permission may violate California’s anti-discrimination law by increasing the student’s vulnerability to harassment and may violate the student’s right to privacy.”
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas, regardless of their treatment of or rapport with gender-confused students.
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such developments is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself in 2019 after trying to live as a man for three years.