A mother of two has filed religious discrimination and retaliation charges against a school system that threatened to fire her for privately telling a coworker she’d pray for him.
Attorneys for Toni Richardson, an educational technician with the Augusta (Maine) School Department, are awaiting a response from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding the complaint. First Liberty Institute of Plano, Texas and the Maine law firm Eaton Peabody filed the complaint regarding the incident that happened back in September.
First Liberty Senior Counsel Jeremy Dys told Baptist Press, “We want to make sure that teachers and employees everywhere understand that you can certainly talk about your faith in private conversations at work and that no employee, whether at a school district or elsewhere, should be punished or be threatened with dismissal for engaging in private conversations that say something like, ‘I’m praying for you.'”
The coworker, a fellow member of a Baptist Church in Augusta where Richardson leads the nursing home ministry, thanked her for her prayers, First Liberty said in a press release. But an Augusta Schools administrator “interrogated” Richardson, “asking whether she had ever identified herself to coworkers as a Christian or privately told a colleague she was praying for him.”
Four days later, the school told Richardson in a coaching memorandum that “she could not use ‘phrases that integrate public and private belief systems’ while at school,” and threatened her with discipline or termination.
Dys said, the Augusta case and others typically arise out of a misunderstanding of the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state.