Inset: The social media image that Brooke Zahn allegedly shared online, which is included in a lawsuit filed against Jeffers Pond Elementary in Minnesota (Minnesota District Court/Brooke Zahn). Background: Jeffers Pond Elementary in Prior Lake, Minn., where Brooke Zahn teaches and was suspended for an alleged social media post (KMSP/YouTube).
A Minnesota elementary school teacher says her district unlawfully punished her for a “private” Facebook post — declaring that “A family that is deported together stays together” — in what she blasts as a violation of her First Amendment rights.
Brooke Zahn, a fourth grade teacher at Jeffers Pond Elementary, filed a complaint last month in Minnesota District Court accusing the Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools district of wrongly suspending her over the deportation post.
Zahn argues that her freedom of speech was violated because her post was uploaded to a “private Facebook group” from her “own home outside work hours, using her maiden name instead of her professional name, from an account that expressly noted it represented only her own personal views,” according to the complaint.
“Defendants purported to justify this action based on complaints they received from outsiders who, to all appearances, had never interacted with Mrs. Zahn professionally but simply read about her speech online, disagreed with it politically, and set out to have her punished for it,” the complaint alleges. “Moreover, defendants themselves had generated many of these comments by using their own speech to call people’s attention to — and to express disapproval of — Mrs. Zahn’s outside-of-work comments.”
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In a statement to The Minnesota Star Tribune, Zahn said she loves her job as a teacher and is “proud” of her “right to free speech.” The district’s decision to “punish” her with discipline and a suspension for her “private opinions” was wrong, the educator claims.
“I am standing up for my rights as a citizen and to ensure this doesn’t happen to other teachers,” Zahn said, per the Tribune.
In her complaint, the Minnesotan notes how she was also disciplined for anti-masking posts that she allegedly made during the COVID-19 pandemic. Zahn says the school told her the posts, including the deportation one, caused a “disruption” — which she condemns as a “pretext or excuse for viewpoint discrimination,” per the complaint.
“Any alleged ‘disruption’ resulted predominantly, if not exclusively, from disagreement by others at Jeffers Pond with the viewpoint expressed in Mrs. Zahn’s private speech,” the complaint charges. “The District has no viewpoint-neutral or generally-applicable policies about how to evaluate or respond to alleged disruption from such disagreements.”
Zahn’s legal team did not respond to Law&Crime’s requests for comment Tuesday. The Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools district also did not respond.
