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The Brownsburg Community School Corp. has agreed to a $650,000 settlement with a former teacher who sued over claims that calling transgender students by their preferred names would violate his religious freedom.
John Kluge, a former Brownsburg High School orchestra and music theory teacher, resigned from the school district around 2018 after he refused to follow a policy requiring teachers to use students’ names as listed in the school’s information system — which could be updated for transgender students who had parental and medical approvals.
Kluge rejected the policy, saying that using names inconsistent with a student’s sex assigned at birth would affirm a transgender identity, which was against his religious beliefs.
Although school officials initially allowed Kluge to address students by their last name, the school district revoked that exception and established its comprehensive policy after complaints from students and other teachers.
In 2019, Kluge sued the school district, alleging it failed to accommodate his religious beliefs in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Kluge was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit legal organization that focuses its efforts on religious freedoms, free speech and parental rights.
“This settlement confirms what the law has always said: Public schools cannot force teachers to violate their religious beliefs,” David Cortman, an attorney representing Kluge, said in a press release Tuesday. “We hope this settlement shows teachers that they do not have to bow the knee to ideological mandates that violate their religious beliefs. And schools should learn that refusing to accommodate religious employees can be illegal and expensive.”
In a written statement shared with The Indiana Lawyer, the Brownsburg Community School Corp. said it continues to believe Kluge’s rights “were not infringed at Brownsburg Schools.”
“During seven years of litigation, multiple federal judges ruled in Brownsburg Schools’ favor and, at the time of settlement, Brownsburg Schools had prevailed on the majority of Mr. Kluge’s legal claims,” the school district said. “After the Supreme Court revisited Title VII in 2023, Mr. Kluge’s Title VII claim survived and was heading for trial this spring. After careful and extended deliberation, it was deemed to be in the best interest of Brownsburg Schools’ financial situation to settle this case.”
In 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana sided with the school district after it found that accommodating Kluge’s beliefs would have caused the school an undue hardship by undermining its goal of “creating a safe and supportive environment for all students.”
“[The school district] was not required to allow an accommodation that unduly burdened its ‘business’ in this manner,” Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson wrote in the court’s July 12, 2021, ruling.
Kluge then appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
Last year, a divided three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit disagreed with that ruling and sent the case back to the district court.
The 7th Circuit judges found there was conflicting evidence in the record to determine whether the school’s concerns were substantial enough to meet new requirements outlined in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Groff v. DeJoy, where the high court unanimously ruled that workers who ask for religious accommodations should get them unless their employers can show that doing so would lead to “substantial increased costs” to their operations.
Under Groff, businesses such as schools must apply a more demanding test to determine whether an employee’s requested accommodation would be a burden on their business.
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