Texas Teacher Loses Fight With District That Fired Her For Tweeting School Full of ‘Illegal Students’

TX – A former English teacher in Fort Worth, Texas, will not resume her previous role at Carter-Riverside High School after requesting that undocumented students be deported in a series of tweets addressed to then-President Donald Trump almost two years ago.

Following an extended sequence of legal proceedings, a Travis County district court judge upheld Georgia Clark’s firing in a Tuesday ruling, according to Dallas-Fort Worth’s CBS affiliate.

Trustee board members from the Fort Worth Independent School District (ISD) originally voted to dismiss Clark in the summer of 2019, about a month after she asked Trump “for assistance in reporting illegal immigrants in the FWISD public school system” and urged his administration to “remove” undocumented people from Fort Worth in multiple messages shared publicly on Twitter. At the time, trustees unanimously supported Superintendent Kent Scribner’s recommendation to terminate Clark, and formally voted to fire her in September.

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath moved to reverse the district’s decision and appointed an independent examiner to review Clark’s case. The commissioner ultimately ruled that her tweets were constitutionally protected under the First Amendment, and pushed for the district to not only reinstate Clark, but compensate her for time spent unemployed or offer her one year’s salary as an alternative.

The district announced its intention to appeal Morath’s ruling immediately after its release. The district described the commissioner’s decision as one that “was not based on the merits of [Clark’s] case but rather a procedural technicality with which the District does not agree. Mr. Morath said, in his ruling, that the Board did not adopt a finding that good cause exists to terminate Ms. Clark’s contract. Yet, the Board of Trustees did, in fact do just that in its decision on September 17.”