Court Battles

Supreme Court won’t weigh teacher’s firing for posts after George Floyd death

by Ella Lee - 05/18/26 10:18 AM ET

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by Ella Lee - 05/18/26 10:18 AM ET

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The Supreme Court said Monday it will not consider whether a suburban Chicago teacher was rightfully fired over inflammatory Facebook posts in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.

Jeanne Hedgepeth was a teacher at Palatine High School in Illinois for 20 years. But while on summer vacation in Florida, she shared incendiary posts about protests following Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.

She wrote in one post that she would need “a gun and training” because “civil war has begun,” and reposted another that advocated for using high-pressure washers against protesters.

Hedgepeth’s school district deemed the posts “disrespectful, demeaning of other viewpoints and racist,” which the former teacher alleges amounted to infringement of protected speech.

“In any other context, such blatant viewpoint discrimination by government officials would be a nonstarter,” her lawyers wrote. “But because Hedgepeth is a public employee, the Seventh Circuit held that the First Amendment does not bar the government from firing her based on the views she expressed in off-the-job speech on topics unrelated to her work.”

The school district has argued that the incident was only the final straw.

In filings to the Supreme Court, the district wrote that Hedgepeth started to struggle with “appropriately moderating her interactions with students” immediately following the 2016 presidential election.

The teacher had already been suspended twice for “profane outbursts” at students by the time her employment was terminated, the school said.

Ultimately, the school district received 113 emails about Hedgepeth’s posts — some of which had multiple signatories, according to court filings.

“Petitioner frames this case as presenting broad questions concerning off-campus speech and ‘cancel culture,’” wrote the school district’s lawyers. “In fact, the Seventh Circuit’s fact-specific assessment of the summary-judgment record adheres to this Court’s long-established precedent and has little import beyond Petitioner’s individual case.”

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