A Tennessee school district has agreed to pay a former student $101, ending a three-year lawsuit centered around a controversial t-shirt.
Brielle Penkoski sued the Overton County Board of Education after she was punished for wearing a shirt with the phrase “Homosexuality is a Sin” in block letters followed by “1 Corinthians 6:9-10” in smaller font. She was sent home from Livingston Academy, a public high school, because school administrators said her shirt had “sexual connotations.”
The school contacted her parents and gave them the option of bringing her a change of clothes. The parents instead opted to pick their student up from school and she was marked absent for the day.
Penkoski sued the school district in October of 2020, arguing the punishment violated her First Amendment rights. The lawsuit argued she was “acting to spread awareness of her views regarding political, religious, and social topics.” Additionally, lawyers representing Penkoski said the school violated her Free Exercise of Religion, Due Process, and Equal Protection rights as well as the Tennessee Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 2009.
“By forcing Plaintiff B.A.P. to choose between abandoning her religious beliefs in order to receive an education and, alternatively, abiding by her religious beliefs only to be demerited and disciplined, the School District has imposed a substantial burden on Plaintiff,” the lawsuit states.
The Overton County Board of Education has agreed to pay Penkoski $101 and require its teachers to go through First Amendment training in order to settle the dispute. The Board did not admit to any wrongdoing.
Penkoski’s father, Reverend Rich Penkoski, was a plaintiff in the lawsuit until she turned 18. Rev. Renkoski runs an online ministry called Warriors for Christ, which protests events like Drag Queen story hours. He was issued a five-year restraining order in Oklahoma in April for posting a photo of a same-sex couple’s wedding to Facebook and citing Romans 1:32 and Matthew 18:6. A judge ruled the post qualified as harassment.
At the time of the incident involving his daughter, he argued that the school was treating his daughter’s t-shirt differently than displays of pro-LGBTQ symbols.
“They’ve got kids walking around with the pride symbol on their sneakers and pride clothing and nobody bats an eye,” Rev. Penkoski said in a 2020 interview, per LGBTQNation, which describes him as a “hate pastor.”
“But if a Christian comes up there and repeats what the Bible says, they are seen as intolerant, they are seen as hateful,” he added.
In an interview with the Christian Post on Jan. 1, Rev. Penkoski said he felt “vindicated” by the settlement.
“A lot of people don't understand this, but when it comes to civil rights lawsuits … there's this perception that somehow we get paid lots of money for these things. Well, it's not true. Most of the time, it's a dollar,” he told the publication via email.
“But Brielle got $100, which is way, way more than we thought she was going to get anyway out of this," he continued. "The other part of this is all the teachers, at least from 2020, were told to start taking First Amendment courses, it was one of the things that I insisted on, that I wanted them to take First Amendment training courses."
