A 17-year veteran Shawnee Mission teacher who was disciplined — and subject to a protest tacitly condoned by the school district — for refusing to refer to students by “preferred pronouns” or “preferred names” has filed a federal lawsuit against the district.
Caedran Sullivan filed the lawsuit Oct. 28, 2024, and announced it via a column at Fox News published Nov. 6, 2024.
Sullivan said teachers at the district have been subjected to “white shaming.”
“Since 2019, when our mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training began, teachers have been subjected to repeated White-shaming sessions that address what the district calls ‘White identity orientation,’ and we have been pressured to use psychological manipulation to, in the curriculum’s own words, ‘overcome resistance,'” Sullivan wrote.
The curriculum she is referring to is the Corwin “Deep Equity” training on which the district spent more than $400,000. The Sentinel requested a copy of the training to review but was denied, citing “copyright” concerns.
In the lawsuit, Sullivan claims her rights are being violated by “forcing her to say things which violate her religious, moral, and personal beliefs by requiring her use words endorsing and supporting the fiction that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that one can disavow his or her sex because one feels like it.”
“In doing so, the government is violating the teacher’s rights of conscience, and the government is also punishing her for speaking up about the government’s imposition of racist, anti-white ideology prevalent in the government’s mandatory DEI training,” the lawsuit reads.
According to Sullivan’s Fox column, “The Corwin Curriculum focuses on DEI over academics, with political ideology such as this: ‘Since 90% of our nation’s teachers are white, the business of achieving greater equity and excellence in public education is in large part a process of transforming the beliefs and behaviors of white educators.’
“For my efforts, I received tremendous public support but also hateful backlash, blatantly false representations of my positions and my actions, and was faced with an increasingly hostile work environment,” Sullivan wrote. “As further punishment, I was stripped of my AP classes and was required to have supervised team meetings for a year.”
“My client cares about every one of her students and just wants to teach kids. She did not want to sue the district,” Sullivan’s attorney Fritz Edmunds said. “She suggested getting away from denigrating anyone based on their race under the guise of DEI.
“She also doesn’t want to hide from parents when their children are experimenting at school with different genders. And she doesn’t want to participate in those experiments because she believes it potentially harms students to endorse the fiction that girls or boys can change sexes or genders. When she tried everything she could and the district punished and demoted her anyway for declining to speak messages that were untrue, harmful to kids, and violated her conscience, she had no option but to file suit.”
Trouble began when Sullivan outed the district’s DEI efforts
In 2023, Sullivan blew the doors wide open on the divisive “training” the district was requiring teachers to undergo.
Writing in The Lion, an online publication of the Herzog Foundation, Sullivan said teachers, students, and parents are “being manipulated and intimidated by a divisive ‘woke’ ideology that is creating a culture of contempt and disrespect.”
“Amidst a worsening teacher shortage that saw SMSD pay $3.5 million to out-of-state agencies to recruit and retain more educators, we are losing good teachers because of an imposed divisive rhetoric that does not inspire mutual goodwill,” Sullivan wrote. “In my school alone, three teacher-coaches left in March, and recently, in one day, four more teachers said they are contemplating leaving the profession.”
Sullivan said SMSD is fostering a “toxic environment and requiring employees to attend Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) training and workshops centered around Critical Race Theory, including Black Lives Matter in the Classroom and Social Justice in the Classroom (using teachers’ ‘white privilege,’ ‘white supremacy’ and ‘de-colonizing our classrooms’ propaganda).”
Moreover, she said, she has had to put up with being called horrible names by other staff.
“One teacher referred to me as a “Nazi” and “fascist” for disagreeing with her views,” she wrote. “There is no ideological diversity; there is no substantial counter-argument allowed. It is wreaking havoc on morale.“
Shortly after, students organized a walkout in protest of Sullivan—at least tacitly approved by the district as no students faced consequences for leaving class—during which they were unable to articulate how Sullivan’s views had affected their academics.
At the protest, the Sentinel spoke to two students, who will not be named as they are minors, who couldn’t point to any specific instances of racism by Sullivan.
“In her articles, she said she can’t be racist because she bought books about black people, and that doesn’t mean you’re not racist because you bought books about black people,” the student said.
However, Sullivan never said purchasing books made her “not racist” but rather that she used her own money to purchase books — mostly by Black and minority authors — for her own use when the district refused to — including Bob Woodson’s Red, White, and Black.
When pressed for examples, the students were unable to provide any — including any evidence of biased grading.
“It’s not solely about her being racist or anything,” another student said. “It’s about her just, like, not being respectful to students and their identities.”
Both said it was “not about the grades.”
“It’s school, we’re supposed to feel safe,” the second student said. “She makes students uncomfortable. Students have switched out of her class because she just continues misgendering them.”
Sullivan is seeking a jury trial, where she will ask for her record to be cleared, unspecified monetary damages, and attorney’s fees.