Teacher’s Case Against School District’s Name Policy Remanded
The Brownsburg Community School Corporation (District) in Indiana terminated a teacher for his refusal to follow the name policy on use of transgender students’ preferred pronouns. Brownsburg High School (Brownsburg) instituted a policy in 2017 mandating teachers to call students by their first names as they appeared in its database. For transgender students who had changed their first names, the database listed their new ones. John Kluge was a teacher at Brownsburg. He repeatedly objected to the school’s name policy on religious grounds. Kluge believed that calling transgender students names that conflicted with their biological sex encouraged their transgender identities which he considers a sin. He requested a religious accommodation, which was granted. Kluge was allowed to call students by only their last names. This lasted for about one school year, then the accommodation was rescinded. Kluge was told to either call the students by their first names as they appear in the school’s database or face termination. He attempted to work with the school and negotiate, but ultimately his resignation was accepted by the school board. He sued the District under Title VII for failing to accommodate his religion and retaliation.
An employer is required to accommodate an employee’s religious practices unless doing so would impose an “undue hardship” on its business. 42 U.S.C. § 2000e(j). At issue in this case is whether the impacts caused by Brownsburg’s accommodation of Kluge rise to the level of an undue hardship for the school under the new standard set in Groff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. 447 (2023). The Seventh Circuit Court found that because material factual disputes exist, the district court’s grant of summary judgment to Brownsburg on Kluge’s accommodation claim was reversed and the case is being remanded for further proceedings.
Key takeaways from the case include that the Seventh Circuit found that facts were needed to determine the undue hardship question and summary judgment was not appropriate. The Seventh Circuit found that the district court should not have defined Brownsburg’s mission. Brownsburg is required on remand of the case to offer proof of its mission pre-dating Kluge’s request for accommodation. The Seventh Circuit, applying the higher standard of Groff to Brownsburg’s argument of undue hardship caused by accommodating Kluge’s religious beliefs, said Brownsburg had not produced undisputed facts demonstrating an “excessive” or “unjustifiable” hardship on its mission of “fostering a safe, inclusive learning environment for all.”
The Seventh Circuit found that whether the accommodation caused harm is unclear at this point and spent time explaining that evidence is needed to show whether the act of using last names in isolation caused objective, not subjective harm. There was conflicting evidence on the sincerity of Kluge’s asserted religious beliefs due to the fact that Kluge used the first and last names of all students as they appear in the database during an awards ceremony for the orchestra. This was the only occasion on which he referred to transgender students by their chosen first names. Kluge explained he felt it would be “unreasonable and conspicuous” to refer to students by their last names at such a “formal event,” as opposed to the classroom setting. He acknowledged that using the transgender students’ chosen first names was “sinful” to him, yet he thought he was “making a good-faith effort to work within the bounds of” his last-name-only accommodation. Brownsburg argued that Kluge’s ability to use the names as they appeared in the database is evidence of his lack of sincerely held religious beliefs. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s denial of Kluge’s summary judgment motion on this question of sincerely held religious belief and held that a genuine issue of material fact exists regarding Kluge’s sincerity.
As a second basis for undue hardship, Brownsburg presented that the last-name-only accommodation exposed it to an unreasonable risk of Title IX liability. It cited Seventh Circuit precedent for the proposition that schools are subject to liability any time they “treat[] transgender students differently than other students.” By contrast, Kluge asserted that by adhering to the last name-only practice, he “treated everyone the same,” so any liability was at most speculative. The Seventh Circuit found that Kluge, by adhering to the last-name-only practice, was not definitely treating transgender students worse than their classmates, or subjecting them to “increased stigmatization” and there remained questions of fact. Brownsburg did not show undisputed evidence that the accommodation placed the school on the “razor’s edge of legal liability,” under Title IX.
Overall, the district court’s decision to not revisit Kluge’s retaliation claim was affirmed based on a waiver by Kluge of the argument. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s denial of summary judgment to Kluge based on factual disputes as to the sincerity of his religious beliefs. Because other factual disputes were found to exist on the undue hardship issue, the Seventh Circuit reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment to Brownsburg as to the undue hardship caused by the accommodation and remanded the case for further proceedings on that topic consistent with the opinion. The Seventh Circuit granted the district court the discretion to decide whether to reopen discovery on remand.
A copy of the decision can be found here.