A Texas teacher who was fired after appealing to President Trump on Twitter to remove “illegal students” from her district has won an appeal of her dismissal, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
English teacher Georgia Clark was dismissed in June after tweeting to Trump, “Mr. President, Fort Worth Independent School District is loaded with illegal students from Mexico. Carter-Riverside High School has been taken over by them.”
{mosads}Clark appealed her firing on First Amendment grounds, and in August an independent hearing examiner recommended her reinstatement, but the school board in September rejected the recommendation, leading her to appeal to Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath.
Morath on Monday agreed with the First Amendment argument and ruled Clark was entitled to reinstatement and back pay and employment benefits from the nonrenewal period for her contract. The district has the option to pay her a years’ salary instead of reinstatement, according to the newspaper.
“It appears the commissioner ruled the way he did based on a technicality and we are exploring all of our options,” Barbara Griffith, a spokeswoman for the school district, told the Star-Telegram. “This is all we are going to say right now as we have not yet had a chance to review and analyze the entire decision.”
Morath ruled that Clark’s tweets fell under her right to contact elected officials outside of the workday and that her contract did not waive that right. He further wrote that while the district rejected the independent examiner’s conclusions of law, it proposed none of its own.
“If a school board wants to change conclusions of law, the school board needs to actually draft new or changed conclusions of law and to provide a real explanation of the change,” the ruling states, according to the newspaper.