
Front view
The quality of teachers in public education is consistently a hot news topic. Regardless of the focal point, topics such as classroom management; US teaching approaches, compared to that of other industrialized nations; tenure benefits and drawbacks; cooperative learning, as opposed to more competitively geared class structures are all frequently discussed yet less often brought to a consensus. Depending on the time period and current political climate, teachers may be professionally evaluated on a range of criteria.
What about their bumper stickers?
On January 7, 2011, an English teacher at Imagine Prep (Surprise, AZ) was fired for refusing to remove at least one bumper sticker from her car. It seems that, in the two months that she had been teaching at this school, a group of approximately five parents united to vocalize their opposition to bumper stickers on this teacher’s car, which they found offensive. The car, which hosts a total of 61 stickers, range in
content from environmental, to feminist, to LGBT matters, to political, to religious, to non-categorical. Three particular bumper stickers were addressed in meetings between the teacher, principal, vice principal, and Regional Director, and the teacher was placed on paid administrative leave for a day after refusing to move her car off campus. In the final meeting, the Regional Director, Linda Kiefner, issued
a directive: Remove at least one bumper sticker from the car (“Have you drugged your kid today?”) or park off campus for the remainder of the year. (The other two bumper stickers in question – one being political and the other being religious in nature – were omitted from the final order.) When the teacher refused to do either on the grounds that this directive was a violation of her First Amendment rights, she was immediately fired.
It was made clear to the teacher that the quality of instruction within her classroom was not being called into question. Rather, the issue was that “the interpretation of [her] bumper stickers did not fit in with the culture of the community.” It may help to add that this was a public charter school – not a private, religious school – whereby the focus was to adequately prepare students for college.
My question is this: Is it acceptable to fire a public school teacher for the expression of her/his belief systems, if those beliefs are kept out of the classroom learning environment?

Rear view