NJ School District Settles For $325,000 With Former Teacher Who Says She Was Forced to Digitally Edit Out a Student’s Trump MAGA T-Shirt in Yearbook Photo

A school district in New Jersey has reached a settlement and have agreed to pay $325,000 to a former teacher who says she was forced to digitally edit out a student’s Donald Trump MAGA t-shirt in a yearbook photo. 

The teacher, Susan Parsons, is set to net about $204,000 in compensation from the settlement, which will be paid by the district’s insurance carrier, with the remainder covering attorney fees.

Parsons, who has since retired, sued the Wall Township school system back in 2019, saying she was ordered to edit out the Trump t-shirt from the yearbook to make student Grant Berardo look like he was wearing a plain navy blue T-shirt and while the school board approved the settlement agreement on Tuesday, they made no admission of wrongdoing or liability over the 2017 incident. 

The removal of the T-shirt sparked outrage among parents in the community, where Trump won both 2016 and 2020, and hit national headlines amid accusations of censorship which caused the district to later reissue the yearbook with the original unaltered image.

Parsons claimed she voted for Trump in 2016 but felt forced to take action after the principal’s secretary told her to alter the t-shirt and when the yearbook was released and anger erupted over the incident, Parsons said she was made a scapegoat by the district and received death threats by phone and mail.

From The Daily Mail:

She told NJ Advance in 2019 she was left feeling like ‘some scourge’ and was scared to leave her home

‘My life has not been the same and I don’t think it ever will,’ she said at the time. 

The student at the center of the scandal said he had worn the MAGA T-shirt as a ‘historic’ statement but said the school could have retaken the photo if it had been a problem.

‘If there was a problem, somebody could have just told my mom,’ Berardo said at the time. 

‘They had a re-take day. But no one said anything.’

His father branded the incident ‘censorship’ and demanded the books be reprinted.  

‘It’s serious because it’s censorship,’ Joe Berardo told ABC 7 at the time.  

‘It’s a teaching moment. It’s a teaching moment for all the kids to understand that someone made a bad decision. 

‘That decision has consequences and therefore we’re reissuing this because it was a violation of somebody’s First Amendment rights and there was censorship. That’s it.’