A high school senior is suing her own school in Cleveland under claims thatthey suspended her from school and are withholding her diploma after she came out as
They suspended this girl for coming out as a lesbian on Facebook, and withheld her degree. Threatened to retaliate if she made further comments on social media.
SCOTUS has ruled that privately held companies can have religious discrimination, established in Burwell v Hobby Lobby (2014) allowed hobby lobby to refuse providing contraceptive Healthcare coverage to their employees. I would not be surprised by the current court siding with the school over the student.
The lawsuit claims this is a violation of the schools disciplinary policy as well as a breach of her tuition contract.
Neither of those are religious discrimination. Based on the schools own policy the first offense should result in a single day in school suspension yet they skipped the normal process and applied the strictest punishment they could.
Also, they continued to collect or kept, I can't remember the language used, the tuition paid but wouldn't fulfill the obligation required for that tuition.
I feel like before it even got that far she could just go to whatever job or college she's trying to apply to with a news story about her high school being stupid for proof of education and a few letters of recommendation for proof of character and just skip the diploma altogether
FYI, in case anybody is interested in sharing their thoughts on the schools behavior in a polite manner, the head of the school's email is publicly available on the school website.
They also were not complying with their own social media policy. Even if this hadn’t been a group chat with her friends, their own policies stated that a social media violation was a single day suspension.