Nothing happened for the first few days after Michelle Mickens reacted online to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
A veteran educator in the Oglethorpe, Ga. district, Mickens often discussed news and political events with friends on her private Facebook page, and the Sept. 10, 2025, shooting of Kirk—an outspoken conservative activist and close ally of President Donald Trump—was no different.
At home, Mickens posted one of Kirk’s controversial statements on gun violence. Later, she replied to friends debating the post, at one point saying: “I don’t condone violence of any kind, and I certainly don’t condone this, but he was a horrible person, a fascist full of hate for anyone who was different.”
But behind the scenes, someone had taken a screen shot of Mickens’ discussion and posted about another teacher fired for comments about Kirk, with the comment: “The Georgia b— is next.”
Within days, a screenshot of her posts had been circulated along with her name and her school district’s phone number, urging readers to demand Mickens be fired. She was asked to go home early on Sept. 12, and put on indefinite leave. On Sept. 29, she was told through her union representative that she would be fired if she refused to resign. The school board hired a replacement for her classes on Oct. 14, though she had not been fired officially, and she fired a wrongful termination lawsuit on Oct. 20.
Ten months later, in July 2026, Mickens settled a wrongful termination lawsuit brought on free-speech grounds with the Oglethorpe district for nearly $300,000, including for emotional distress and attorneys’ fees.
“You become a teacher to teach in the classroom, not to learn the law” about public employees’ protected speech, Mickens said. “If you’re not somebody who’s involved in ed. policy, it’s very likely you don’t know these things.”
A year after Kirk’s shooting at Utah Valley University, backlash against the educators who criticized him and their resulting lawsuits continue to work their way through the courts, both courts of law and of public opinion.
Of more than a dozen individual and collective lawsuits related to teacher disciplinary action for responses to Kirk’s assassination, the majority have been settled or decided in favor of educators’ free-speech rights, according to an Education Week analysis. But the episode has thrown into sharp relief teachers’ increasingly precarious position in the age of social media: Public employees are often treated as public figures.
Social media never has a dearth of heated debates; in fact, studies find combative and inflammatory posts get more engagement and are more likely to go viral on social media. Legal experts say teachers who engage in discussions of hot-button topics online now can face not just offended parents and community members, but the rapid dissemination of their posts, leading to doxxing, as well as organized campaigns against them, sometimes from far outside their communities.
“Because they are entrusted with youth, teachers have this very special place in our society,” said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a professor of First Amendment and free-speech law at George Washington University. “So many people get particularly outraged when a teacher is not comporting herself or himself in the most perfect, ideal way possible. In reality, it’s very dangerous for teachers to post on social media.”
Teachers were fired or disciplined after Kirk’s assassination
Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, sparked intense opinions in social media throughout his life. The conservative influencer garnered millions of followers online, in part by touring college campuses across the United States to debate on issues such as immigration, gun control, race, and more, and posting videos of the debates. He was killed by a sniper while engaging in one such debate at Utah Valley University in Orem.
In the hours after the shooting, thousands took to social media to denounce the assassination—and in some cases to criticize Kirk’s outspoken stances on gun violence and other political issues.
Lauren Vaughn, whose termination was the one referenced in the post calling for Mickens to be fired, also quoted Kirk on balancing the cost of gun deaths with the importance of Second Amendment rights, posting from a private Facebook account. A teaching assistant in South Carolina’s Spartanburg County School District Five, Vaughn later posted: “The WHOLE point here is that anytime someone is killed its[sic] a tragedy. Even someone I may not like. Even someone I disagree with. But instead of accepting it, why don’t we do something about it?”
Vaughn also was fired by her district, and has an ongoing lawsuit in federal court in South Carolina against her former employer. It alleges that the district’s media policy, which says employees “must be respectful and professional in all communications (by word, image, or other means),” and “always represent the District in the best light” regardless of setting—on or off campus, in private or professional accounts—is overly broad.
Vaughn had an unblemished teaching record before her firing, but has been unable to work in education since last year. She wants to return to the classroom, said Jack Cohoon, Vaughn’s attorney.
Under law, educators face a ‘balancing act’
The fallout from the Charlie Kirk moment highlights tensions in the legal framework that usually governs public employees’ free speech rights.
The 1968 Supreme Court case Pickering v. Board of Education set the legal framework for courts, by seeking to balance a teacher’s free-speech rights to comment as a citizen on “matters of public concern and the interest of the state,” with a school district’s interest in avoiding disruption to the “efficiency of public services.”
Vaughn, Mickens, and other teachers disciplined for their social media reactions argue that under the First and 14th Amendments, public anger at their opinions alone is not disruptive enough to outweigh their rights to participate in public life as citizens, outside of their professional lives.
For example, Vaughn’s post about the Second Amendment and her concern about gun violence “was a matter of public interest and import,” Cohoon said. “If a teacher or educator can’t speak on that without facing retaliation, essentially educators don’t have freedom of expression.”
But in the nearly 60 years since Pickering, teachers have continued to face legal and social censure for voicing opinions on highly charged news events. Waves of educators have been disciplined or fired for reactions to everything from U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to race-related posts from across the political spectrum in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
In theory, the Pickering balancing test applies to all public employees. In practice, legal experts said, teachers often are held to a higher standard than other public employees, even school district administrators.
“The question really becomes, is the speech that the employee engaged in so extreme that it’s causing significant disruption?” said Sam Boyd, the lead attorney for Mickens’ case and a senior supervising attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “People calling the school and saying, ‘We don’t like what your teacher said'—that’s not going to be enough.”
George Washington University legal scholar Papandrea has been studying the evolution of legal frameworks for civility and collegiality among public employees, like the employee social media rules being fought over in Spartanburg. She said that while courts tend to consider even offensive political speech protected, the sheer volume of complaints that social media comments can generate can lead to evidence of disruption.
Before social media, she said, the disruption was often direct: a teacher who attacks particular students, for example, is herself carrying out the disruption.
“But what we are seeing in most of these cases is that the speech is not itself disruptive,” Papandrea said. “No one’s jumping up and yelling and making it impossible for the school to function. Instead, [teachers] are posting on social media in their private, off time. And with the Charlie Kirk situation, the audience is reacting negatively and because it’s gone viral, you have people around the country calling the school to get the teacher fired.
“I always tell teachers, don’t think of privacy settings as some kind of magic bullet,” she continued. “Once someone takes a screenshot and sends it, suddenly it’s out of your control. It’s very hard to put that genie back in the bottle.”
Teacher discipline is usually local—but one state got involved
That’s exactly what happened to Mickens, Vaughn, and Texas teacher Jennifer Courtemanche.
Courtemanche was pulled into the fray while teaching English at the Goose Creek school district north of Galveston. She replied online to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s contention that Kirk’s murder was politically motivated.
“I’ll bet if the victim had been Black or Brown or a Democrat influencer he’d have been singing a different tune,” she posted. “Could Kirk have baited just ONE too many people? Could this have been the consequences of his actions catching up with him?”
She later reposted updates from a friend and the partisan advocacy group Occupy Democrats, both listing controversial quotes from Kirk on gun violence and other issues, and another denouncing the lack of Republican reaction to the politically motivated murder of Minnesota State House Speaker Melissa Hortman in her home less than three months earlier.
Courtemanche’s social media feeds blew up with expletive-loaded comments and direct message threats from as far away as Vancouver, British Columbia. One posted more than 115 all-caps repetitions of “SHE DESERVES TO DIE.”
Within hours of Kirk’s death, Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Houston, who represents Goose Creek, shared pictures of screenshots of Courtemanche’s and other educators’ posts about Kirk via social media, explicitly calling for the Goose Creek school district to “FIRE HER NOW!!”
In a 2-0 vote with four abstentions, the district terminated Courtemanche’s contract within the week.
Courtemanche was one of some 350 Texas teachers targeted for investigations based on social media reactions after Kirk’s death, and unusually among the states, Texas state officials got involved in teacher discipline, something that is usually a local responsibility.
On Sept. 12, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath directed school districts to report “instances of inappropriate content being shared” related to Kirk’s death and said the Texas Education Agency would investigate and potentially revoke teachers’ licenses over the comments.
The Texas AFT, the state teachers’ union, sued in federal court to block those investigations, arguing that with no definition or criteria for what would count as “inappropriate content,” the investigations would discipline teachers for political speech that had not caused the substantive disruptions needed to pass the Pickering test, and cause broader chilling of free speech for teachers.
“It’s had a demoralizing effect on teachers that we can’t even agree to disagree or have conversations shared with those who should be your most trusted circle of people to speak freely as a citizen of the country,” said Texas AFT President Zeph Capo.
A federal district court judge ultimately threw out the union’s lawsuit in August 2026 without addressing the substance of those claims.
The state’s ethics rules for teachers specifically prohibit speech that incites “illegal conduct,” so at the state level nearly all of the complaints against teachers were dropped. Capo said the Texas teachers’ union feels comfortable defending the two remaining teacher cases open for investigation under that language.
“It could still be a year of more of somebody’s career, going through these investigations for things that are part of the First Amendment,” Cappo said. “But we still consider it a win that 200-some-odd educators did not have to go through a lengthy process that could jeopardize their employment.”
But in a sense, it’s still only a technical win. It didn’t clarify how the state should have interpreted Pickering in the first place.
Meanwhile, the actual firings of Texas teachers related to their social media post were handled at the district level. Courtemanche settled with the school board just two months later in lieu of suing for wrongful termination for an undisclosed amount. She voluntarily resigned at the end of 2025 and retired instead of returning to the classroom.
The experience “didn’t sour me on teaching,” she said. “If I could go back in the classroom, I would still be a good teacher. I loved all the kids that came through my classroom door.”
A ‘chilling effect’ on speech—and collegial trust
The statute of limitations on First Amendment claims can extend for up to six years, depending on the state, which means more educators who were censured or terminated for reactions to Kirk’s assassination could continue to sue. As recently as this summer, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas filed suit on behalf of former Russellville, Ark., high school teacher Joshua “Chance” Duncan, who alleges he was fired for comments related to Kirk and later rejected for another teaching positions in the state because of the dismissal.
Boyd, Mickens’ attorney, said the Southern Poverty Law Center continues to receive questions and new cases related to the Kirk fallout. So far, most cases have settled and the few courts that have ruled on Kirk-reaction cases have sided with the teachers.
“The settlements so far have been large, and reflected the fact that these firings are blatantly unconstitutional,” Boyd said. “I think in a lot of cases, administrators took hasty decisions in a really heightened political climate, without thinking through their legal responsibilities and potential liability.”
Overall, say those fielding the cases from teachers, the fallout from Kirk’s death has emphasized that school districts need to be careful to avoid overreactions and knee-jerk reactions, said Cohoon, the lawyer representing Vaughn, the South Carolina teaching assistant. “Looking in retrospect at how many of these cases are progressing … terminating employees to avoid the possibility of controversy is looking less and less defensible with the passage of time.”
Courtemanche’s settlement has allowed her to keep her teaching license, but she said deeper damage to her feelings of safety and collegiality in education have lingered. She still can’t prove who initially captured and promoted her post, but she has received dozens of threatening messages and voicemails, some urging her to kill herself, noting where she lives, or threatening to beat her up.
She firmly rejects criticisms that she influenced her students.
“You know, we [teachers] don’t have time to indoctrinate children,” she said. “I never spoke about my political beliefs or religious beliefs. Those are the third rail in education; you don’t talk about those things in the classroom. I taught English/language arts and … I stayed in the district’s [curriculum]; I didn’t deviate from it for personal reasons.”
Mickens, a 2022 finalist for Georgia Teacher of the Year, said in her nearly 25 years teaching high school English, she made it a point not to engage in controversial discussions inside the classroom. When Georgia passed a “divisive concepts” law in 2022 banning the teaching of certain topics related to race and bias, she wasn’t worried.
“Teachers don’t talk about that in the classroom anyway; I know I never have,” Mickens said. “You stick to facts, you stick to whatever it is you are teaching, and you can’t go wrong.”
She has continued to tutor students privately while dealing with the recent death of her mother, but said returning to public school teaching is “definitely on the table.”
“Right now, we see things moving very swiftly; every day there’s a barrage of things in education—and politically for that matter—so I think it’s really important to take a deep breath and address things as they come,” Mickens said.
Mickens said her experience in the past year has convinced her that educators need to be more aware of their rights and involved in professional groups. “A lot of teachers have never heard of Pickering, don’t understand their 1st and 14th Amendment rights, don’t understand the divisive concepts legislation that has gone through states,” Mickens said.
She has become more involved with the Georgia Education Association, the state teachers’ union, in advocating for protections for teachers and students in legislation.
“So many [teachers] feel their speech has been chilled or they’re afraid, and I want to be their voice,” she said. “If anything, I’m more voracious than I’ve ever been about that. I will not go gently into that good night.”
