Settlement In Madison County

MADISON COUNTY, Ind. (WOWO) — A Madison County school district has been ordered to pay $195,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a former counselor who was fired after going against the school’s gender identity policy.

Kathy McCord, a 37-year educator, filed the lawsuit back in May 2023 shortly after she was fired from the South Madison Community School Corporation in Pendleton. She was fired in March 2023.

In 2021, the Corporation issued a directive that required counselors and other employees to use, upon a student’s request, names and pronouns for the student that do not correspond with his or her sex without notifying parents or getting parental consent. McCord spoke to a journalist about that directive.

The Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit on behalf of McCord.

“No American should be fired for expressing her beliefs, especially not an educator speaking in her personal capacity, on her own time, and out of concern for her students,” said ADF Senior Counsel Vincent Wagner. “Kathy knows that kids do best when schools and parents work together. But South Madison left parents in the dark. It’s regrettable that South Madison made Kathy endure three years of litigation to get to this point, but we are pleased with this result for Kathy.”

Wagner says that McCord explaind to her supervisors that she objected to the directive that she not seek parental consent before using cross-gender names and pronouns for a student. McCord says her supervisors told her she had no choice: If she wished to keep her job, then she had to follow South Madison’s directive.

Shortly after ADF attorneys filed McCord’s lawsuit, a new Indiana law took effect that required South Madison to rescind its directive not to require parental notification. But when she worked for South Madison, it required counselors like McCord to use a form called a “Gender Support Plan” to document whenever the school decided to begin using cross-gender names or pronouns for a student and whether the school would notify a student’s parents. South Madison did not require parental consent, or even parental notification, to change a student’s name and pronouns.

The Alliance Defending Freedom says they started using Gender Support Plans without consulting the school community or parents at a board meeting—in fact, without even posting it on the district’s website.

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