Spanierman v. Hughes, No. 06-1196 (D. Conn. Sept. 16, 2008)
A U.S. District Court in Connecticut has ruled that school district’s decision not to renew a nontenured teacher’s employment contract after investigating complaints about his MySpace profiles did not violate his First or Fourteenth Amendment rights. Jeffrey Spanierman, an English teacher at Emmett O’Brien High School (EOHS) in Ansonia, created a MySpace profile page on which he communicated with students regarding school-related and nonschool-related matters. After being tipped off about the profile by another teacher, Francesca Ford, EOHS guidance counselor Elizabeth Michaud viewed the profile and concluded that it contained inappropriate comments and “peer-like” discussions between Mr. Spanierman and students. When Ms. Michaud spoke to him about his profile, he deactivated it. However, shortly afterward he created a new profile, which Ms. Ford also discovered and reported. There also were allegations of complaints to Ms. Ford about the profile. Ms. Michaud informed EOHS Principal Lisa Hylwa, who met with Mr. Spanierman and placed him on administrative leave with pay while an investigation was conducted by a state education labor relations specialist. Upon completion of the investigation, Ms. Hylwa sent a letter to Mr. Spanierman explaining that he had exercised poor judgment as a teacher. That same day, Assistant Superintendent Anne Druzolowski informed Mr. Spanierman that his contract would not be renewed for the following school year. Superintendent Abigail Hughes upheld this decision. Mr. Spanierman sued the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and principal, claiming violation of his rights to procedural and substantive due process, equal protection, free speech, and free association. The defendants moved for summary judgment all claims, seeking dismissal of the suit.
The district court granted the motion. The court first rejected Mr. Spanierman’s argument that, for purposes of due process, he had a constitutionally protected property interest in his continued employment at EOHS. Because this case did not involve termination or dismissal from employment, but rather nonrenewal of an employment contract, the procedural due process question was simply whether the defendants could, upon completion of the school year and without cause, decline to renew the teacher’s nontenured employment. The court rejected Mr. Spanierman’s attempt to rely on the state’s teacher tenure act as providing him with a protected property interest in that his employment contract was governed by the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiated by the teachers’ union. The CBA did not impose on the school district the requirement that nonrenewal of a nontenured teacher’s contract could only be for “just cause,” and Mr. Spanierman thus had “no legitimate claim of entitlement” to renewal. Even if the state’s teacher tenure act had applied, the court found, the procedural due process claim would fail for three reasons: (1) the case involved mere nonrenewal, not termination; (2) the teacher’s argument, if accepted, would erase the distinction between tenured and nontenured status, nullifying the benefits of tenure; and (3) the statute itself specifically provides for ending a teacher’s continued employment by simply not renewing the teacher’s contract for the following school year, so long as the school district provides proper notice. As for the substantive due process claim, this also failed, not only because the teacher had no “federally protectable property right” at stake, but also because he failed to demonstrate that the defendants’ actions “constituted a gross abuse of governmental authority” or “shocked the conscience.”
Turning to the equal protection claim, the court noted that this was based not on Mr. Spanierman’s belonging to any suspect class, such as his race, ethnic origin, or religion, but on the “class of one” theory, under which a plaintiff argues that he or she was arbitrarily treated differently from a similarly situated individual. The court found that the U.S. Supreme Court in Engquist v. Oregon Department of Agriculture, 128 S.Ct. 2146 (2008), “explicitly held that ‘the class-of-one theory of equal protection does not apply in the public employment context.’” Nor, for that matter, had the teacher presented convincing evidence of teachers who were similarly situated but not subject to discipline.
Lastly, the district court discussed the teacher’s free speech and free association claims. Before addressing Mr. Spanierman’s argument that the defendants had retaliated against him for exercising his free speech right to maintain a MySpace profile, the court found that it was clear Mr. Spanierman was not acting pursuant to his duties as a teacher when using MySpace, so that the Supreme Court’s holding in Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410, 421 (2006), that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline,” was not applicable. The court then examined whether Mr. Spanierman was expressing his views as a private citizen or as a public employee, concluding that almost none of the contents of the MySpace profile was on a matter of public concern except a poem about the Iraq war. Without question, the teacher suffered an adverse employment action, the court found, but he “presents no evidence of retaliatory animus, and there is nothing in the record to indicate that the Defendants intended to retaliate against the Plaintiff because of the political views expressed in his poem.” As a result, the court found he failed to establish a direct causal connection, and the time between the exercise of the alleged protected right and the adverse action was too attenuated to establish an indirect connection. Even if Mr. Spanierman had demonstrated a causal connection, the court added, his claim would fail because the defendants would be able to demonstrate “by a preponderance of the evidence that they would have taken the same adverse action in the absence of the protected speech, or that the [teacher’s] speech was likely to disrupt school activities, and the likely disruption was sufficient to outweigh the First Amendment value of [the teacher’s] speech.”
As for the free association claim, while the court assumed for the sake of analysis that “MySpace is the organization with which the [teacher] claims he was associated,” there was “no evidence in the present case that MySpace, as an organization, purports to speak out on matters of public concern,” and, at any rate, “This analysis is essentially the same as the causal connection analysis for the freedom of speech analysis … .”
Spanierman v. Hughes, No. 06-1196 (D. Conn. Sept. 16, 2008)
[Editor’s Note: Information on other controversies involving online and off-duty speech is below. The next links are to the Legal Clips summaries of Engquist and Garcetti. The last link is to the January 2008 issue of the Council of School Attorneys journal Inquiry & Analysis, available for download, which included an article on “Employee Use, Misuse, and Abuse of Social Network Sites.”]
NSBA School Law pages on teacher off-duty speech controversies
NSBA School Law pages on Engquist v. Oregon Dep’t of Agr.
NSBA School Law pages on Garcetti v. Ceballos
COSA eDocs store resource on employee social networking, By Michelle A. Todd, John L. DiJohn, and Shayne L. Aldridge