Central Bucks School District has recently been embroiled in a series of controversies centered on its treatment of LGBT students and its allies, and another dispute, this time involving a teacher, has been added to the list.
Last week, Central Bucks social studies teacher Andrew Burgess filed suit against the CBSD and its superintendent, Abram Lucabaugh, alleging that he was suspended late last school year and then involuntarily transferred to a different school because of his vocal advocacy for LGBT students. The suit also alleges that retaliatory measures have continued to be levied against him, in violation of his civil rights.
The 37-page lawsuit was filed Tuesday, April 11 in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Burgess is being provided pro bono legal representation by both the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the law firm of LeVan Stapleton Segal Cochran LLC.
Burgess’ lawsuit, which names both the district and Lucabaugh personally, seeks compensatory and punitive damages, legal costs, a permanent injunction restoring Burgess to his original position, a purging of any record of his suspension and transfer from his personnel file, and a prohibition against further retaliatory actions.
At press time, neither CBSD or its board have released any public statement in response to Burgess’ suit. The court has informed the defendants that their formal response to the suit is due June 13. The district has retained the Philadelphia firm Duane Morris LLP to represent them in the matter.
Andrew Burgess has a long history of advocacy for LGBT students at Lenape Middle School, where he had been an 8th grade social studies teacher for 14 years. He had vocally opposed the school board’s continuing attempts to restrict or outright ban scores of books from the school’s library for having LGBT or other alleged “inappropriate” content.
Matters became heated when, last year, on behalf of a trans student and their family who sought his help regarding the lack of response by the school to ongoing bullying of the student, Burgess filed a complaint with the Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. A month later, Burgess says, he was called into a disciplinary meeting with school administrators, including Lucabaugh, to address the OCR complaint and his anti-book banning advocacy. Burgess was subsequently suspended in May 2022, shortly before the end of the school year. In fact, he was escorted out of the school in the middle of the school day, witnessed by staff and students — something that rarely occurs when the person in question has not been deemed a security risk.
According to his attorney, Burgess is currently not speaking to the press. However, in a written statement released through ACLU PA, Burgess said, “This particular student’s experiences had been reported to the administration repeatedly. But instead of properly addressing the situation, the district’s administration disciplined me and then accused me of the very thing that they themselves had done. They failed to act at a time when this student needed their help and support.”
Burgess then filed another complaint with the OCR, this time on behalf of himself, accusing CBSD and Lucabaugh of retaliatory practices. It was then he was informed that he was being transferred out of Lenape Middle School to Unami Middle School a week before the start of the current 2022-2023 school year, in violation of teacher contract rules. Also, Burgess says that his new seventh-grade assignment required him to teach unfamiliar content, and that he was assigned a heavier student load than any other social studies teacher at Unami.
Burgess’ lawsuit contends that CBSD is well aware of the problems district-wide, certainly in terms of how the district’s reputation has suffered. This is born out by the fact that the district hired a Philadelphia public relations firm to bolster CBSD’s public image.
The reaction of Lenape students has been both immediate and vocal. After Burgess’ suspension, students staged a number of demonstrations, both in support of Burgess and in opposition to the myriad anti-LGBT policies and decisions enacted by the school, as well as the school’s lack of response to the ongoing anti-LGBT bullying problem.
CBSD’s administrators reacted harshly to the student demonstrations. Lucabaugh was reported as saying, “This stops now,” threatening to involve the police in response to the demonstrations.
For the last couple of years, CBSD has been embroiled in an escalating series of controversies and conflicts regarding a series of homophobic policy decisions.
In January of this year, CBSD’s board, by 6-3 vote, imposed Policy 321, forbidding teachers and other school employees to express personal opinions about political and “controversial” social issues. Further, the policy mandated that Pride flags and any LGBT-positive material be removed from classrooms and school grounds. It should be noted that two of the six who voted in favor of the policy, Debra Cannon and Lisa Sciscio, are members of Moms for Liberty, a national right-wing activist group that lobbies for anti-LGBT policies in schools across the country.
The enactment of this policy also sparked protests, with teachers and parents joining students to protest the policy.
“As a teacher, I not only feel unheard and untrusted I ache for our students — not just LGBTQ+ students — all students because Policy 321 is an attempt to close them off from the world that exists outside of Central Bucks,” said Rebecca Cartee-Haring, an English teacher at CB West High School.
There have also been several reports that teachers at Lenape have been told by school administrators that they are not to address trans students by their preferred names and pronouns, only by those names assigned at birth. Several Lenape teachers have gone on record, saying they refuse to obey such instructions.
The district’s school libraries have been under siege for some time now. According to PEN America, CBSD is one of the leading book banning districts in the country. Currently, CBSD’s board has a list of over 60 books “under review” for possible elimination from the district’s school libraries. These are books containing LGBT characters, alleged critical race theory, and other so-called “inappropriate” or “pornographic” content. Burgess’ vocal opposition to this process is one of the major things that got him into hot water.
In October 2022, ACLU PA filed a Dept. of Education OCR complaint on behalf of seven transgender and non-binary students who maintain that district policies and practices have subjected them and their supporters to a hostile educational environment. The complaint charges that CBSD is subjecting its LGBT students to “a toxic environment.”
Richard Ting, one of the ACLU attorneys handling this complaint, when questioned by PGN about the current status of the complaint, replied, “OCR is still investigating. We do not know how far along they are or what their anticipated timing is on concluding the investigation, but we know they have been interviewing Central Bucks parents and community members.”
The controversies of the past year have proven expensive for the district. According to public records, CBSD has paid out at least $250,000 in legal and public relations fees since May 2022. The Philadelphia public relations firm Devine + Partners alone billed the district $144,000 for work done from May to January. In February the firm terminated its arrangement with the district, citing harassment of its staff.