May 04, 2007  |  By: JOEY DIGUGLIELMO  | COMMENTS     

A settlement has been reached in a dispute between a journalism teacher at Woodlan Junior-Senior High School in Woodburn, Ind., and East Allen County Schools that stems from a student-penned op-ed piece supporting gays that ran in January in the school newspaper.

Amy Sorrell will remain with East Allen school district but will be transferred to Heritage Junior-Senior High School where she’ll teach English. As part of the settlement, Sorrell was forced to issue an apology stating that she did not intend to suggest that the district was intolerant of gays. She was suspended without pay for one week.

Sorrell hedged a bit, though, in a post-settlement statement that said, “I do not agree with the reprimands that have been issued against me. However, due to my personal financial circumstances, I am not in a position to contest the disciplinary action contained in the written settlement agreement.”

Sorrell said in an interview that she wishes she had the wherewithal to continue the fight, but it isn’t practical and that she did what she had to do to save her job.

“I have to be realistic,” she said. “I’m the breadwinner of my family. My husband even offered to sell his motorcycle, which was sweet. That might get us by for a couple more months, but who knows how long something like that would drag on.”

East Allen superintendent Kay Novotny accused Sorrell of “neglect of duty and insubordination” in an excoriating statement released after the settlement that said out of “compassion,” Sorrell was being allowed to remain with the district despite her “relative youth” (Sorrell is 30) and “obvious inexperience.”

CRITICS DENOUNCED the school board for punishing Sorrell, while acknowledging the board’s legal right to do so.

In her statement, Novotny said — and Sorrell acknowledged — that the district is allowed to control content of the Tomahawk, the student paper.

In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier that school administrators at Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis had the right to censor stories if a reasonable educational justification could be made for the censorship.

Sorrell said she and Woodlan Principal Ed Yoder had a verbal agreement that she let him read items she thought might be controversial before they ran in the Tomahawk.

“I really didn’t think twice about [Chase’s column],” Sorrell said. “I didn’t know that in 2007, that a column about gay tolerance would raise any eyebrows.”

Novotny claimed the problem had more to do with portions of the column — penned by sophomore Megan Chase — that “appeared to question or criticize some people’s religious faith.”

Chase acknowledged a “religious aspect to the argument” and concluded that beliefs that homosexuals “are automatically sent to hell … seem extremely unfair” and that she doesn’t think some religious teachings about gays are “right or fair.”

UNDER SORRELL’S DIRECTION, students won 12 journalism awards at a recent state competition.

“It’s just now starting to sink in that I won’t be teaching journalism anymore,” Sorrell said. “That’s why I became a teacher. … I worked hard to build that program.”

And East Allen County Schools may not be as gay-friendly as Novotny intimates. According to the Journal Gazette, a Fort Wayne, Ind., newspaper, in 1995, East Allen’s school passed a resolution that “denounces anything that conflicts with families including drug abuse, premarital sex and homosexual behavior.”

Tim McCaulay, the district’s legal counsel, couldn’t immediately confirm the resolution or say if it still stood, but said he would check into it.