Lee County

A state administrative judge has recommended that Lee County end a middle school teacher's suspension over a Facebook post and pay her the wages she lost, and the school board is the body that decides whether to follow him

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 20, 2026

An empty classroom photographed at desk height. Half a dozen single desks with white tops, blue trim and green upholstered chairs stand in loose rows on a pale wood floor, each with a printed worksheet and a yellow pencil laid on it. Daylight comes through slatted blinds at the left. No person, no whiteboard writing, no signage, no school name and no legible text of any kind is in the frame. Illustration of an ordinary empty classroom, not a photograph of this event or this school. — Stock photo. Not the actual scene. *Photo: Andy Barbour / Pexels*

What it changes

The Lee County School Board suspended a teacher at Three Oaks Middle School in Fort Myers over a Facebook post about Charlie Kirk. A state administrative judge has now recommended that the suspension end and that she be paid what the suspension cost her. Whether that happens is up to the board, not the judge, and that distinction is the whole story. The recommendation comes from Judge Andrew Manko of the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings, in an order dated August 14, and it is reported by Ana Goñi-Lessan of The News Service of Florida. This desk has not obtained the order itself: DOAH's public portal will only return a document against an exact case number, none of the outlets carrying the story published one, and a search by party name returned nothing. So the findings below are as that report gives them, and they are attributed accordingly rather than asserted as read. Manko found the post caused what he called minimal disruption. He is quoted as writing that Ms. Roller's private Facebook post on her personal Facebook page was not unethical, and that it was not her action but that of a third party that resulted in its dissemination. The post went up on September 10, 2025, the day Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah. It criticised his past defence of the Second Amendment, it was on a private account, it was screenshotted and spread by someone else, and it was deleted in under an hour. The board's position was that the post caused substantial disruption at the school. The judge is reported to have found that two parents complained, and that they complained to the board rather than to the principal, and that of fifteen to twenty emails the principal received about the post he sent a generic response to only a few. That is the finding that carries the ruling. Disruption in these cases is not a feeling, it is a quantity, and the judge measured it and found it small. Here is the part that matters for anyone reading this as though it were a court judgment. It is not one. A DOAH recommended order is a recommendation to the agency, and the agency issues the final order. The Lee County School Board can adopt it, and it can decline to. There is a recent instance of exactly that. In June a different DOAH judge, Jodi-Ann Livingstone, recommended that the Martin County School Board rescind the termination of social studies teacher Matthew Theobald and award him back pay and benefits, finding the board had not proved just cause. Martin County objected and entered a final order affirming the suspension without pay and the termination. So the Lee County board now holds a document that says one of its employees should be back at work with her lost wages restored, and it holds the authority to disagree with it. The money is the concrete part. Back pay for a suspension running since the autumn of 2025 is a real number on the district's books, and it grows for as long as the matter stays unresolved, which is a consideration the board carries whichever way it decides. The wider frame is a state one. The then education commissioner, Anastasios Kamoutsas, wrote the day after the shooting that he would investigate every educator who posted what he described as vile, sanctionable comments about it, and districts across Florida opened cases. Several of those have now reached DOAH, and the judges have begun issuing findings that turn on evidence of actual disruption rather than on offence taken. The Lee County School District did not respond to the reporter's request for comment, and Roller's attorney could not be reached. There is no final order in this matter yet, and a reader should not treat the recommendation as one.

Where we read it: Ana Goñi-Lessan, The News Service of Florida at Gulf Coast News. Read their story.

The document: No public filing has been released.

A state administrative judge has recommended that Lee County end a middle school teacher's suspension over a Facebook post and pay her the wages she lost, and the school board is the body that decides whether to follow him

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