COLUMBUS, Ohio – A central Ohio school district was justified when it fired a middle school science teacher for insubordination, but also violated his First Amendment rights by requiring him to hide his personal Bible from students.
That was the decision handed down today by the Ohio Supreme Court in the case of John Freshwater, fired by the Mt. Vernon School District in 2011 for teaching creationism and using a heating coil to mark an eighth-grader’s arm with a cross.
By a narrow 4-3 margin, the court upheld rulings by lower courts and a school referee that the firing was valid because Freshwater’s refusal to remove religious symbols from the classroom constituted insubordination, according to the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor.
However, the court ruled that district violated a middle school science teacher’s First Amendment rights when ordering him to remove his personal Bible from his classroom.
Limited to reviewing the lower court decisions for “abuse of discretion,” the justices agreed with those courts when they determined that the board of education had “good and just cause” to fire Freshwater because he was guilty of insubordination when he refused to remove a Ten Commandments-themed collage, a poster showing a Biblical verse and other material.
O’Connor wrote that the court did not need to address the issue of whether Freshwater was unconstitutionally “injecting his personal religious beliefs, including creationism and intelligent design, into his science class instruction.”
However, she wrote, the district violated Freshwater’s First Amendment rights by telling him to remove his Bible from his desk because it feared complaints from parents about Freshwater violating the separation of church and state.
“Unsubstantiated fear alone cannot justify flouting the First Amendment,” O’Connor wrote.
In his dissent, Justice Terrence O’Donnell said Freshwater’s firing for insubordination was not supported by the evidence and he should be reinstated with back pay. O’Donnell wrote that the district “singled out” Freshwater “because of his willingness to challenge students in his science classes to think critically about evolutionary theory and to permit them to discuss intelligent design and to debate creationism.”
O’Donnell wrote that teachers also have a First Amendment interest in choosing their classroom materials and that academic “extends to the teaching of controversial subjects.”