A gay Spanish teacher has won $90,000 after suing her school district for allegedly punishing her for supporting LGBTQ+ students.
Eileen Brennock filed a lawsuit claiming she was subject to a hostile work environment at Oregon’s Mountain View Middle School in the Newberg school district because she spoke out against Principal Terry McElligot, who she alleged told staff at a September 2021 meeting that it’s not acceptable to tell students it is okay to be LGBTQ+, Oregon Live/The Oregonianreported.
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She also claims the now-retired administrator instructed staff not to hang Black Lives Matter or Pride signs in their classrooms so as not to “poke the bear” (at the time, the school board had just instituted a policy banning both types of displays, but a judge ruled it unconstitutional a year later).
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The suit claims that after the meeting, Brennock reported McElligot’s alleged statements to Assistant Principal Lindsey Kopacek, who proceeded to gaslight her, telling her McElligot never said any of it and that she must have imagined it “due to cortisol and stress levels.”
Brennock replied that if a student told her they were gay, she would tell them, “Me too!”
After that, the suit says, Brennock endured a hostile work environment and filed a complaint with the Oregon Department of Education. Even after the department ruled in favor of Brennock, school officials allegedly did not stop harassing her, and the department found the school to have violated their agreement, failing, among other things, to follow through on required staff training on LGBTQ+ issues.
Brennock also claimed the superintendent at the time, Stephens Phillips, used a gay slur and that the district altered the wording in the anti-discrimination presentation the agreement had established to say LGBTQ+ identities were a “lifestyle” and LGBTQ+ people are from the “opposite side of the fence.”
The district maintained that McElligot never said the hateful words at the staff meeting but also argued that if she had said them, it would not have been discriminatory since it was “not intended to be.”
The state Education Department disagreed, saying in its ruling that “the district misunderstands what constitutes discrimination under the law.”
The ruling stated that the alleged comments “clearly articulated that teacher conduct toward students belonging to certain protected classes should be different than conduct toward other students.”
The school district did not admit liability in the settlement but agreed to publicly state it would foster an inclusive environment for students and staff, as well as make discrimination complaint forms available online and in print beginning next school year.
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