A federal court has reduced the verdict awarded to a New Haven teacher who sued the city claiming that school administrators tried to stop her from speaking in public about health safety issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A federal court jury awarded teacher Jessica Light $1.1 million in damages a year ago after finding that the New Haven Board of Education and the principal at her school tried to prevent her from speaking in public, retaliated against her for doing so and defamed her by falsely accusing her of leaking confidential health information.
U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton reduced the verdict to $450,000 earlier this week after ruling for New Haven on a post-trial question the city raised about whether the jury verdict was unclear about who specifically was responsible for the retaliation.
Light had been a teacher for nearly 15 years and was teaching a third grade class at the Worthington Hooker School during the period at issue in her suit.
Arterton’s decision granted New Haven’s request for a retrial on the portion of Light’s suit that accused the city of retaliating against her for questioning pandemic safety measures in public and outside of meetings with school administrative officers. It also reduced the $1.1 million verdict by the $625,000 Light had been awarded for her retaliation claim.
The judge left intact the jury verdicts for Light on her claims that a school administrator interfered with her speech rights and defamed her by falsely asserting that she had disclosed a colleague’s COVID diagnosis. The jury gave Light $450,000 on the speech and defamation claims.
Light’s 2022 suit revisited the contention over in-person and remote learning during the period of the pandemic, as does Arterton in her 57-page opinion on New Haven’s request to either reverse the jury’s verdict or, in the alternative, reduce the damages or order a new trial.
In the public statements at issue in the case, Light expressed concern about the safety of returning to in-person learning during the pandemic.
“To say that the COVID-19 pandemic hit schools hard would be an understatement — and public debates around in-person versus remote instruction were particularly contentious,” Arterton wrote. “The teacher’s union in Connecticut, AFT Connecticut, understood that its members might want to address certain public health policies. Consequently, in July 2020, it sent a letter to its members, including Ms. Light, explaining their First Amendment rights to speak as public citizens about matters of public concern, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Ms. Light considered it her duty as a parent, educator and public citizen, to advocate for certain safe reopening policies and ask questions of the Board to ensure it was considering educators’ perspectives in deciding how and when to reopen for in-person instruction,” Arterton wrote. “She spoke at several Board meetings and parent meetings about her concerns.”
The school administration received the same letter from the union and Worthington Hooker principal Margaret-Mary Gethings arranged a meeting with staff and faculty “in part to explain their rights to advocate for specific policies as public citizens,” according to the decision.
But not long after the meeting, Gethings and a deputy met with Light and complained that her public comments reflected poorly on them and that the superintendent was holding them responsible for Light’s remarks, according to the decision.
The conversation scared Light, but she felt it was her duty to continue to advocate for “certain district-wide reopening policies,” the decision said.
Among other things, Light wrote on social media that she had not received a letter having to do with COVID infections among staff — a letter the administration said it had distributed. In response, she was reprimanded for causing “the community to be fearful when there was nothing to be afraid of,” and told that that she “was not operating as a good teammate.”
When Light attended a school board meeting on social distancing policies, she was criticized for not addressing her questions to the administration, according to the decision.
“In short, the administrators seemed to be growing frustrated that Ms. Light continued to publicly advocate for and question certain policies rather than keep everything ‘in-house,’” the decision said.
Concern about Light’s advocacy showed up in her annual evaluation, normally a 15-minute session that in Light’s case stretched to an hour and a half and focused on her “professionalism.” She was told she was being transferred against her wishes to a first grade class because she had a child at the school who would be entering the third grade.
Light claimed when she testified that normally parents who were teachers would have their children enrolled in classes of other teachers. She said her child could have been assigned to one of two other third grade teachers.
Much of the evaluation meeting, which Light recorded — the recording was admitted as trial evidence — was devoted to her COVID-related advocacy at board meetings and the comments she made on Facebook, according to the decision.
“While repeatedly acknowledging her right to make such comments, the administrators claimed that she was sowing fear within the (school) team and broader community and reflected negatively on her ‘professionalism,’” the decision said.
A week after the evaluation meeting, the school administrators confronted Light with a rumor that she had leaked a fellow teacher’s COVID diagnosis to parents. Light denied doing so, but Gethings said others had accused her of being the source.
At the trial of the suit, Gethings acknowledged “that no one had said such a thing directly to her,” according to the decision.
Light and school administrators complained in writing about one another to higher ups.
Light testified at the trial that she felt like she was being “pushed out” of school activities such as a learning workshop for which she had secured grant money and her position as a teacher representative on the Parent Teacher Association. She said she was rebuked for asking another teacher to cover for her during dismissal so she could use the rest room.
When she began teaching first grade in the new school year beginning in August of 2021, a representative of the administration sat in her class at least four times taking notes with no explanation. In October, Light took a medical leave based on what her clinician called “Complex PTSD being triggered by hostile work environment, increase in anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, lack of sleep and difficulty concentrating.”
She had suffered from post-traumatic stress earlier as a result of sexual abuse as a child and her father’s murder when she was a teen, according to the decision.
“Ms. Light’s relationships with her colleagues seemed to go from chilly to toxic after her return. Whereas in previous years, she and her colleagues would eat lunch together in each other’s classrooms, Ms. Light now ate her lunch alone,” the decision said.
When she testified at the trial Light said, “prior to my advocacy I was … I had no problems with anyone. I never sat alone at lunch. I was involved in every committee I could possibly be involved in. I loved it there. I was happy to be at work. I felt supported.”
She eventually took a job teaching third grade at another New Haven school.
