Fired Football Coach Sues School Officials for Retaliation Over Political Differences – Alex Nester (Free Beacon) / Feb 16 2021
Longtime high school coach David Flynn says school violated his First Amendment rights
A Massachusetts high school football coach is suing three public school district officials for retaliation after he was fired for questioning his daughter’s seventh-grade world history curriculum.
Dedham Public Schools superintendent Michael Welch announced in January that the district would not renew head coach David Flynn’s contract because he “expressed significant philosophical differences” with the school district. Those differences surfaced last fall, according to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch on Monday, when Flynn and his wife emailed a list of concerns about their daughter’s world geography and ancient history class to Welch and Dedham school committee members. In one lesson, Flynn’s daughter was asked to analyze a cartoon that depicted police officers as a “risk” to a black pedestrian.
Flynn and his wife said parents were not made aware of curriculum updates that taught lessons on politics, bias, and race “unrelated” to a seventh-grade world history curriculum. The coursework, they said, was “not suitable for twelve- and thirteen-year-olds,” and even given its focus, the lessons were not taught “objectively.” Middle school history teacher Kim Randall created an avatar of herself for her online classroom that wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and used materials that depicted police officers as “risks” to black people and black people as “risks” to white people.
