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Obama-appointed judge orders two teachers who opposed DEI training pay $313,00 for district’s atty fees

April 14, 2023 | | Print Article

Two Missouri teachers who were forced by their school district to undergo divisive, racist, hateful “diversity” training have lost their case against the district thanks to an Obama-appointed judge.

This week, federal district Judge Douglas Harpool, who was appointed to his post in 2014, awarded the district $313,000 in attorney fees on the basis that the district deserved to be compensated for having been forced to defend its mandatory diversity training requirement.

The two teachers, who’d been seeking no more than $1 in damages and were primarily interested in convincing the judge to rule that the diversity training was unconstitutional, were floored by the decision.

Listen to one of them and her attorney below:

“It’s absolutely excessive,” the attorney, Southeastern Legal Foundation general counsel Kimberly Hermann, said Thursday on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends First” about the ruling.

“The point of it is to chill speech. This is a First Amendment case in the first place where our clients were required to attest and affirm to ideas they just simply don’t believe in. They believe that America should be colorblind. They believe that they should not have to look at the color of the student’s skin, and that’s all that they were fighting for,” she added.

Also speaking on the show, one of the two teachers, Brooke Henderson, went on to describe the training.

“The training was a mandatory training, and it had us agree to stating that America is systemically racist, that if we believe in a colorblind America, that we’re white supremacists. And it really just felt like there was no hope and that the wheels had come off the bus of what our jobs as educators was,” she said.

The training started in 2022 but really picked up steam this year.

“The training had started a little bit the previous year. Nothing to this extent. So this was district-wide, where every single person in the district, from the bus driver to cafeteria workers to our custodial crew, teachers, every single person had to undergo this lengthy training,” Henderson said.

Harpool, the judge who presided over the case, reportedly has a history of donating to Democrats:

Asked whether the training violated her constitutional rights, Henderson replied with an emphatic yes.

“It absolutely did violate my constitutional rights because I was not allowed to speak my own opinion, and if I did, then I would be told I was wrong or I would be called racist. I had to locate myself on the oppression matrix, and no matter where I located myself, based on the color of my skin being white, I automatically fell into that racist category,” she said.

“So if you tried to speak up, then you were dismissed and you were told that you were wrong. If you didn’t attend the training, then you potentially had your pay docked, you did not receive credit. I was worried that I would be written up or, even worse, fired,” she added.

Amazingly, she continued, she still has a job.

“I have been very blessed. I still have my job. And you know, it’s a job that I absolutely love to do. I’ve been an educator for well over 20 years. I’ve worked with students with disabilities,” she said.

“So in this situation, I was blessed that I had a legal team that came in there — they are amazing — that could help me. And so at this time, I still have my job. And I hope that I can keep it, because I love getting to make a difference in kids’ lives,” she added.

So-called “diversity” training — which is usually known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) training — has, unfortunately, infected every major institution in America, despite it being rooted in an evil, racial essentialist philosophy that defines people not by their individual character, but by the color of their skin.

According to this sick ideology, all minorities are “victims,” whereas all white people are “oppressors.” It doesn’t matter if the specific white person is as poor as dirt and the specific black person is as rich as a celebrity.

Dovetailing back to Henderson’s case, Southeastern Legal Foundation has vowed to appeal Harpool’s ruling.

“The teachers have appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit,” the law firm announced following the ruling.

Vivek Saxena
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