DOYLESTOWN, PA — In a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the Central Bucks School District, a middle school teacher is claiming that district administrators began retaliating against him last year for advocating for a transgender student who was being harassed and bullied.
In March 2022, the teacher, Andrew Burgess, filed a complaint at the behest of a transgender student and his family with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) after he said administrators failed to address repeated harassment by classmates.
In his suit, Burgess said the district responded by suspending him in May and informing him that his employment status was under review. He was then reassigned from Lenape Middle School, where he had taught since 2006, to Unami Middle School just days before the start of the 2022-23 school year.
Burgess said new assignment included switching him from teaching eighth grade to seventh, new course material, and an increase in the number of students in his classes.
Burgess said in the suit that he also opposed apparent efforts to censor teachers’ classroom library materials that dealt with LGBTQ+ themes. He expressed his concerns to district leaders multiple times, and, when his building principal sought to meet individually with teachers who maintained a classroom library in March 2022, Burgess, who is a union leader, suggested that the principal instead held a group meeting with teachers on the issue.
“When a struggling student came to me, I did what we should want any teacher to do. I advocated for that student, as I had for numerous students in the past,” Burgess said. “That’s why teachers get into this work, to support, guide, and nurture our students.
The lawsuit states that the district has violated both the First Amendment and Title IX, by…
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