Sarah Morse, an American working as a history teacher at a high school in Arbroath, Scotland, responded to students, telling them she is Catholic and opposes abortion, when her teenage pupils asked her directly what she believed as they were studying Nazism. She told them they were free to have their own opinions. The Angus Council fired her a few hours later.

Morse is now going before an employment tribunal seeking relief. She is demanding the council show that it followed fair process, gave her a hearing, and had an articulable legal basis before she was terminated.

Morse’s case unfolded under British employment law, but the question it raises is not a foreign one. American teachers face the same scenario, and the answer for them turns on a body of U.S. case law most people have never had reason to learn.

An American teacher who said the same thing would be wrong to assume the free-speech and free-exercise guarantees found in the First Amendment offer her absolute protection. Under Garcetti v. Ceballos, speech delivered as part of a government employee’s official duties, including an answer a public-school teacher gives mid-lesson, belongs to the school, not the employee. Saying “this is just my personal opinion” does not change that: Garcetti asks only whether the speech arose from the job, not whether the speaker called it fact or opinion. If it arose from the job, the Constitution has almost nothing to say about the outcome.

In 2022, the Supreme Court sided with a football coach disciplined for praying alone at midfield after games. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District held that Coach Joseph Kennedy’s prayer was personal expression, not part of his official duties, and rejected the theory that everything a coach or teacher does on school property belongs to the government. But the ruling rests on a narrow distinction. Kennedy’s prayer was silent, unscripted and disconnected from any lesson he was paid to deliver. A teacher’s answer to a student’s question, given mid-lesson, arises directly from the act of teaching itself. Kennedy loosened Garcetti’s grip on off-duty religious expression; it did not remove it from the classroom. This may surprise anyone who assumed American teachers automatically have greater protections than a country, like Scotland, without a First Amendment.

A student sitting in the same classroom, by contrast, might find constitutional protection under the Tinker line of precedent. Since a student is not a government employee, she can voice a belief without being punished unless it causes real disruption. The teacher answering that same student’s question has no comparable shield.

So the protection Catholic and other pro-life teachers need in American public schools must come from somewhere other than courts. It has to come from prudent policy, written clearly enough that a principal knows what to do so that teachers and staff are not muzzled for conveying their respect for all human life.

In February 2026, the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance treating individual free-exercise rights as the organizing principle rather than institutional neutrality as the default, building on the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that a Maryland school district violated parents’ free-exercise rights by denying them the ability to opt their children out of instruction that conflicted with their religious beliefs. That is real, substantive progress, and Catholic parents and teachers should recognize it as such.

This guidance, however, does not enforce itself. Morse’s case shows what happens when a public employer skips the analysis entirely. Better federal guidance can cut down on how often confusion rather than considered judgment is going on.

This is where the U.S. Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty’s recommendations, still in draft form, deserve a close look and a quick path to adoption. Though addressed to federal agencies, they are just as relevant to the state education departments and local school boards that actually run public schools, since it is state and local policy, not federal agency guidance, that will govern the next case like Morse’s. They invent no new rights; they address the gap between doctrine and practice directly.

The commission has called on federal agencies to issue guidance on parents’ opt-out rights, promote the right of students and employees to express religious views on campus, and, most relevant to Morse’s case, require any official who disciplines an employee over religious expression to put the legal basis in writing within 30 days. That recommendation is a due-process fix, and a modest one, but it protects no one until agencies, state boards of education, and local school boards convert it from proposal to binding rule. It does not tell a school board what conclusion to reach; it tells the board to show its work. Federal, state and local policymakers alike should require that at a minimum. Even beyond that, teachers should know that their views expressing the sanctity of life, which after all reflects American values embracing human dignity, will not get them punished.

Schools as government employers have enormous discretion when it comes to their employees. What can change is whether that discretion gets exercised carelessly or carefully. That depends on policymakers writing the rules down before the next Sarah Morse fields a student’s question.