When news broke of Charlie Kirk's death on Sept. 10, some Houston-area teachers turned to social media to share their views on the conservative influencer.
Not long after, they were out of work.
In the aftermath of the shooting on a university campus in Utah, reports began to surface of teachers in several different public and private schools in Southeast Texas being terminated or placed on leave for posts critical of Kirk and his politics.
At the same time of the assassination, reports of a school shooting in the Denver area began to spread. Marie Brookreson, a teacher at Crosby High School northeast of Houston, posted the words "Thoughts and prayers..." to her Facebook page.
She said her post was in reference to the school shooting. However, she liked a comment on the post that read, "charlie kirk?" That led some people to believe her post may have been mocking Kirk's death. Among them was Houston-area state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, who later posted a screenshot of the online interaction as well as other posts by Brookreson voicing support for the transgender community.
Cain called for her immediate termination.
"Mrs. Brookreson has no business in the classroom," Cain wrote. "Her only goal in education is the indoctrination of America's youth."
The next day, Brookreson was put on administrative leave, with pay, and recommended to the Crosby ISD school board for termination. A letter detailing her dismissal cites two other earlier incidents about "politically-charged" conversations in her classroom and for "making some students uncomfortable" for the topics and her delivery.
The district sent her a second letter on Sept. 16, informing Brookreson that she was being reported to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) for "posting inappropriate content following the assassination of Charlie Kirk." Brookreson said she believes her comment regarding Kirk was the final straw for the district.
The agency is reviewing more than 280 complaints against teachers accused of making inappropriate comments online about Kirk.
"While all educators are held to a high standard of professionalism, there is a difference between comments made in poor taste and those that call for and incite further violence — the latter of which is clearly unacceptable," Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said in a statement to The Texas Tribune.
The disciplinary actions against teachers over their comments about Kirk amount to attacks on their free speech rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The nonprofit said in a statement to Houston Public Media that "democracy depends on all Americans' ability to participate freely in public debate and discussion, even when their views strike others as offensive or wrongheaded."
"When they're off the clock, public school teachers and other government employees have a First Amendment right to speak in their personal capacity on matters of public concern," FIRE also said. "That's important. Millions of Americans work for the government at the national, state, or local levels, and silencing them would strip countless voices from the national conversation."
Raising Cain
Brookreson was not Cain's only target. He also posted several screenshots of posts by two other teachers from Lee High School in Goose Creek ISD east of Houston. The screenshots show posts from one of the teachers writing, "Looks like his so called ‘facts' caught up with him" and "#Karma is a b*tch." A different screenshot shows another teacher posting Kirk's comments from an old interview, with the teacher writing, "in case anyone has MAGA amnesia." The teacher later commented on Facebook, "what [Kirk] stood for to his core was trash."
The two Lee High School teachers could not be reached for comment.
Goose Creek ISD initiated termination proceedings on Sept. 22 against the teacher who posted "#Karma is a b*tch." That teacher can request a hearing with the TEA to appeal the termination. Board members say they decided not to terminate the other teacher, writing in a news release that school district administration did not deem their comments to rise to the level of termination.
In August, Cain launched his campaign to represent the newly redrawn 9th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. His campaign website lists Goose Creek ISD board trustee Mercedes Renteria III among his endorsers.
The screenshots on Cain's account include the teachers’ full names, some places of work and photos. His accounts on those platforms have nearly 70,000 followers combined.
On Tuesday, ahead of Brookreson's termination hearing, Cain posted a video urging his following to show up to the hearing and demand the school board do the "right thing and terminate [Brookreson's] employment."
"We’re simply sharing public information they had on their public pages," Cain told Houston Public Media. "My purpose in doing this is to ensure that — essentially in my opinion — woke teachers are not in the classroom. And if that means exposing them or naming them, so that parents know who to remove their children from their classroom, or what schools to contact, then I’ve served that exact purpose."
Each time Cain posted about Brookreson, she said it returned a flood of hateful rhetoric to her inbox.
"I have gotten everything from [death] threats in my Facebook Messenger all the way to I should not be allowed to teach children," she said. "There are almost no words to describe how I feel. I was gutted."
Screenshots shared with Houston Public Media show messages from strangers threatening to show up to her school and calling her a "worthless waste of air." Brookreson admitted she is scared.
Brookreson has worked as a teacher for 22 years and is working with a lawyer to appeal her termination.
"When my lawyer asked me yesterday, ‘What do I want to see happen?' And my response was, ‘I want to go back to my classroom,' he was shocked," she said. "But that’s what I was called to do. That’s what I spent my life working on. I am defending my name."
Public vs. private
Sarah Rollwitz works at the Bilingual Education Institute teaching adult literacy to immigrants. Rollwitz posted to her private Instagram account several stories questioning some of the responses to Kirk's death.
"I had posted a few things about, have we considered school shootings and have we considered Gaza?" she said. "This is the thing that you guys are choosing to speak out about, after everything that’s happened in the past calendar year? I was trying to call out that hypocrisy of saying, OK, you care about lives, you care about people, so what about these lives and these people?"
Rollwitz said she was fired the next day.
"I had to leave my classroom and I had to leave my office, and I had to take all of my things, and it was really rough," Rollwitz said. "It was on my private Instagram for my followers who agreed to follow me [and] who requested to follow me. It had nothing to do with any work. And so what even is free speech?"
The Bilingual Education Institute did not respond to several requests for comment. Rollwitz is currently speaking to lawyers about her next steps.
Tom Leatherbury, who leads the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, said claims of termination due to a violation of the First Amendment will depend heavily on the specific incident. Claims against private institutions will be difficult to establish, he added.
"It would be fact dependent, but the teacher would claim unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination that they were singled out because of the nature of the political speech they engaged in online and that was the only reason they were fired," he said.
Leatherbury added that even valid claims of First Amendment violations could be tied up in the courts for years.
Brookreson’s posts were public but made on her personal Facebook account.
"I don’t get plugged in at night," she said. "I’m an actual human being with actual human thoughts and I have the right to have those thoughts."
Cain said free speech rights do not outweigh a teacher's responsibility to model respect and safety for students.
"I think it’s important to know what kind of people are educating our children," he said.
Cain and his wife home school their five children.
"Teachers have a position of trust and influence, especially with young and impressionable students," he added. "The public expects them to model that we respect decency and safety, not celebrate political violence or mock someone’s death while everyone has First Amendment rights. Those rights do not remove professional obligations."
Leatherbury warned about the effects of the mass firings and the consequences of how the posts were publicized.
"It’s a form of cancel culture and it’s wielding the levers of government, the levers of power to suppress speech that they don’t like, pure and simple," Leatherbury said. “It’s a very fraught area. I think it has really serious consequences for how this was brought to light."
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