(Pexels)
By John Hugh DeMastri
Daily Caller News Foundation
A Rhode Island educator sued his former school on Dec. 30 after allegedly being fired for choosing to opt out of the teachers’ union.
WND is now on Trump's Truth Social! Follow us @WNDNews
John Lancellotta filed a lawsuit against West Warwick Public Schools alleging that when he chose to no longer pay his teachers’ union dues and leave the union, administration decided to deny him tenure and not renew his contract. Lancellotta alleges that he chose to leave the union because it took “positions on political and social matters which did not match his own opinions” and that his First Amendment rights were violated.
“The decision to opt out of a union should not cost someone their job,” Derk Wilcox, senior attorney for the Mackinac Center, a group that challenges government overreach and who filed the lawsuit on Lancellotta’s behalf, said in a Wednesday press release. “Not renewing John Lancellotta’s contract in retaliation for his opting out of the union is a clear violation of his constitutional rights. School districts across the country must recognize and respect public employees’ First Amendment rights as protected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision.”
Lancellotta alleges that he could not have been fired because of performance as he had never been given a grade below “highly effective” or “effective” on performance reviews. The appeals process of the termination allegedly showed that the school did not take into account Lancellotta’s performance evaluations and had made the decision to fire him based off of the department head’s recommendation.
“The district considers the [union] to be a ‘district partner,'” Sean Doyle, president of the West Warwick Teachers’ Alliance labor union, told Lancellotta after he chose to leave the union. “In my twenty-seven years here, the [school district] has never carried an (sic) non-union member in it’s (sic) employment.”
West Warwick Public School’s lawyers allegedly teamed up with the union’s lawyers to prepare the school’s position for the hearing despite being told by the hearing chair the matter was not to be discussed, the lawsuit stated.
“School districts across our state are violating the constitutional rights of their own teachers,” Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a group focused on protecting union members’ freedoms and choice, said in a press release. “West Warwick was one of about a dozen school districts in Rhode Island our Center identified in a report last March that maintained blatantly unconstitutional language in its collective bargaining agreement, deceiving teachers into believing they must pay the union. To then manifest this bogus language into illegal action by firing John Lancellota is an injustice that the courts must remedy.”
West Warwick Public Schools, the Mackinac Center and West Warwick Teachers’ Alliance labor union did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The “Climate Change Cult.” The “Anti-Racism Cult.” The “Cult of Wokeness.” The “LGBTQ Cult” and its predatory offspring targeting America’s children, the “Transgender Cult.” The “Cult of Abortion.” The “COVID Cult.” The “Cult of Globalism.” “TikTok Cults.” Every month the list grows.
To right-thinking Americans attempting to make sense of a nation seemingly gone mad, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the irrational, deranged – and often demonic – leftwing political and cultural movements currently capturing the minds of millions of Americans are nothing short of full-fledged cults.
Although the high priesthood of all these leftwing religious cults – i.e., university professors, academics and other Marxist ideologues and activists – may be true believers, the people actually wielding REAL POWER do not believe any of it. To them, these leftwing cults conveniently serve to disguise and distract “the rabble” from what the leader class is REALLY up to, which is the pursuit of ever more power, wealth and glory for themselves, and a total transformation of America and the world.
All of this and much more is explored in a powerful, insightful and absolutely unique way in the latest issue of WND’s acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled “HOLY WAR: Defeating the growing cult of leftism and its total war on Christianity.”
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
The post Teacher sues school that fired him after he ditched their union appeared first on WND.
