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** For Immediate Release
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April 8, 2025

PJI Settles COVID Vaccine Mandate Case For 15 Public School Employees

SALEM, Ore. – The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) has negotiated a settlement on behalf of 15 Oregon public school employees whose district placed them on unpaid leave for being unable to receive COVID-19 vaccines for religious reasons.

In August 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oregon Health Authority mandated that public school employees throughout the state be vaccinated against COVID-19. However, the OHA’s vaccine mandate allowed school districts to grant exceptions to employees unable to receive COVID-19 vaccines for religious reasons. Accordingly, 15 employees of Springfield Public Schools (SPS) – all of them members of various Christian denominations – applied for religious exceptions. The school district responded in October 2021 by putting all 15 employees – a group that included teachers, support staff, and even a cafeteria worker – on indefinite unpaid leave, without benefits.

Among the employees was a female teacher who was pregnant at the time the district placed her on leave. She had to resign and take a job at a Christian private school to obtain much-needed health insurance. Another was a male junior high teacher whose wife was pregnant and depended on her husband for health insurance.

SPS called the employees back to work in April 2022, with roughly 2½ months left in the school year. At a time when Oregon’s then-governor, Katherine “Kate” Brown, had lifted masking, social distancing, and other COVID-19 prevention measures in the state’s schools, SPS effectively called attention to the employees’ unvaccinated status, requiring them to wear KN95 masks, eat lunch in their classrooms or cars alone, and submit to regular testing – things vaccinated employees did not have to do. This raised the question of whether SPS could have implemented such measures earlier in the school year so the 15 employees could keep working.

“Federal law requires employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious beliefs where they can do so without undue hardship,” explained Ray D. Hacke, one of PJI’s Oregon-based staff attorneys. “Six months of unpaid leave is not an accommodation – it’s a de facto suspension, a coercive measure aimed at forcing employees to choose between their faith and their livelihood. In some cases, like with the pregnant teacher, it was basically a firing.

“These employees all had to either dip into their savings or scramble to find other ways to earn money to make ends meet, all because they refused to abandon their sincerely held religious convictions concerning COVID vaccines. The district could have accommodated these employees without sending them home for six months and still achieved its interest in preventing the spread of COVID. Had the district done so, no lawsuit would have been necessary.”

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