The Jurupa Unified School District in California’s Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles has run into a bit of a problem. Last year they fired a gym teacher named Jessica Tapia for allegedly refusing to follow the district’s policies regarding interactions with gender-confused children. Tapia informed them that the policies were in conflict with her religious beliefs and values. Rather than taking a knee or submitting to the school district’s demands, she took them to court. This week, Jurupa Unified settled out of court with Jessica Tapia and paid her a settlement of $360,000. However, the district still insists that it did nothing wrong and does not appear to be inclined to change its policies. (CBS News)
An Inland Empire school district has reached a settlement in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by a teacher who says she was fired for not following their policies regarding gender identity due to her religious beliefs.
Jessica Tapia, a former physical education teacher with the Jurupa Unified School District, says that she reached the $360,000 settlement more than a year after she was fired.
She says that the entire ordeal began when she posted videos online that were openly critical of major department stores and their marketing of LGBTQ clothing, specifically directed towards young children. Those videos were then reported to the district.
The school district released a statement saying that the settlement was “not a win for Ms. Tapia, but is in compromise of a disputed claim.” They went on to say that the settlement “certainly does not state or prove any illegal action or discrimination by the District.” But if they honestly believed they were in the right, why settle? Wouldn’t they just wait to be proven correct in court? We can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that the district’s attorneys could see that they were cruising toward a crushing loss that would have wound up costing the school millions instead of hundreds of thousands so they decided to bow out on the cheap.
Addressing the merits of the case, the district continues to insist that Tapia violated district policies, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. This all started when she posted videos to her private social media accounts protesting the marketing of LGBTQ clothing aimed toward children by department stores. The school wasn’t even mentioned. When someone sent links to the videos to the school board, she was pulled from class and told she would need to agree to several odious policies we’ve seen from progressive districts before. She was to address all students by their preferred pronouns and, worst of all, she was directed to keep any discussions of gender-bending secret from the parents. Tapia refused and she was fired.
However, it was made clear that the gym teacher had never once been approached by a student requesting that she use a different pronoun or name when addressing them. It was all still completely hypothetical. In other words, she was preemptively fired before she’d even had the opportunity to violate the policy. That’s probably not the sort of story that the district wanted to see making the rounds on the six o’clock news.
If I could offer a nickel’s worth of free advice to Jessica Tapia it would be to pack her things and move. She should take her $360.000 and use some of it to relocate to Texas, Florida, or some other free state where her values and approach to teaching will be respected and rewarded. Forget about California. It’s a lost cause at this point. Until we can hopefully get the Supreme Court to begin addressing the question of what a woman actually is, things aren’t likely to get much better.