KANSAS CITY, Missouri — A teacher who lost her job at a Catholic school in Kansas City, Missouri, after becoming pregnant has testified that she believed administrators decided not to renew her contract because she wasn’t married but created a paper trail of evidence to justify their decision.
The Kansas City Star reports Michelle Bolen testified Monday in her lawsuit against the former principal of St. Therese Catholic elementary school and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. Bolen had worked for the school for nearly 15 years when she lost her job in July 2015.
Bolen now works at another school. Her attorney said the former principal had never failed to renew a teacher’s contract after having overseen 330 performance reviews over nearly a decade.
A lawyer representing the diocese has said the case wasn’t about her pregnancy, and that Bolen was intent on getting “revenge.”
In an Aug. 20 statement, the diocese called the plaintiff’s claims “outrageous.”
“The plaintiff in this case was employed at St. Therese from 2000-2015. At the end of the 2015 school year, her contract was not renewed. It was not renewed for reasons that a closer reading of the court file would reveal, but not because she was an unwed mother. We expect that the evidence will show that the concerns leading to this action were not new,” the statement said.
Crux staff contributed to this report.
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