VA Supreme Court Upholds Reinstatement of Teacher Tanner Cross

This week, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling, which ordered the reinstatement of Byron “Tanner” Cross, an elementary school gym teacher in Loudoun County. Cross was suspended over the summer after stating at a May school board meeting that he wouldn’t “affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it’s against my religion.”

In June, state Circuit Court Judge James E. Plowman approved Cross’s request to halt Loudoun County Public School’s (LCPS) decision to suspend him contending that Cross was likely to succeed if his case was brought to trial, that the school district had adversely impacted his First Amendment rights, and that reinstating his job was within the “public interest.”

While LCPS stated that Cross’s suspension was partially due to the disruption at the school that resulted from Cross’s comments at the May meeting, both Judge Plowman and the state Supreme Court rejected this assertion by avowing that the handful of calls received by school administrators did not cause the type of disruption that justified a suspension.

This ruling comes on the heels of the Loudoun County school board passing Policy 8040 on a 7-2 vote in August requiring the use of preferred pronouns. The 8040 policy also allows students to use the school restroom of their choosing regardless of their biological sex and permits “gender-expansive and transgender students” to participate in school activities “in a manner consistent with the student’s gender identity.” Additionally, the LCPS policy requires all school mental health professionals in LCPS to undergo “training on topics relating to LGBTQ+ students, including procedures for preventing and responding to bullying, harassment and discrimination based on gender identity/expression.”

The policy also specifically addresses the use of names and pronouns. It states that “School staff shall, at the request of a student or parent/legal guardian, when using a name or pronoun to address the student, use the name and pronoun that correspond to their consistently asserted gender identity.” It further states: “The use of gender-neutral pronouns is appropriate. Inadvertent slips in the use of names or pronouns may occur; however, staff or students who intentionally and persistently refuse to respect a student’s gender identity by using the wrong name and gender pronoun are in violation of this policy.” Now that this policy is passed, and Tanner Cross has been reinstated, it remains to be seen if LCPS intends to enforce this coerced speech policy on Cross and other teachers.

It is now clear that LCPS and other schools across Virginia are guilty of actively seeking to undermine the First Amendment rights of faculty, staff, and students by implementing policies that stand in direct contrast to the United States Constitution. As a result, it is no longer an option for concerned Virginians to sit idly by while these rights are stripped away, and the latest ruling shows that Virginia’s Supreme Court agrees.