I can’t dispute your judgment that the three male teachers should have been fired. It certainly would have helped the diocese’s court case. I don’t have all the facts in the incident, but I doubt that all three men groped the stripper. They were there together and all three were kicked out. It is highly likely that only one of them got touchy. These clubs would not exist if they permanently excluded all the customers who got out of hand once. No charges were filed.
That is not exactly the issue. They should have been kicked out for walking into the strip club. Period. Groping the stripper is simply icing on the cake; it is the cake which is the subject. Simply going to the strip club is such a clear violation of upholding the teachings of the Church that the issue does not need further clarification of “groping” to be a clear violation of the contract.
I don’t know what grade level these men taught at; and it really doesn’t matter. Something like that has the very high potential of getting out and to the students.
The employee handbook for the diocese begins with a statement that the first aim of discipline is to correct a problem. Mrs Herx would not have been fired if her defense was that she did not know IVF was wrong and would stop. Instead she chose to publicly defy Church teaching. It was her decision to turn this into a scandal that could not be tolerated in a Catholic school. She does not deserve a financial windfall for that.
At this point without seeing the actual language of the contract and any attending handbooks from HR, we are speculating.
It is not the least unusual that discipline is to be corrective; however, it is also normal that there are offenses which lead directly to termination, and are not subject to corrective action (and continuation of the contract).
If the clause(s) in the contract were simply to provide corrective (name removed by moderator)ut so that the teachers could live more moral lives, then a) the diocese needs to completely rethink where they are going and why (children need to see teachers as role models), and b) then the diocese was on an even more difficult path to walk and defend.
I kind of doubt that the clause was there primarily for corrective (name removed by moderator)ut. It is far more logical that the clause was there to tell teachers what was expected of them - that anything in their lives which had a likelihood of being public knowledge and which was contrary to Catholic teaching was grounds for dismissal.
As to the size of the judgment, I have already stated that in general I see judgments as too big; however, it was in large part the rash of large judgments in abuse cases, driving dioceses to bankruptcy, that got the message home that the bishops had to make an extremely radical change in the choices that had been made over the years.
If anybody out there has their synapses firing in order, they are going to pay attention to this case, and clean up their act in terms of HR. Sad that it has to come to this, but it seems humans are not capable of making changes until their feet are held to the proverbial fire. Sloppy HR procedures are going to result in judgments. As my high school principle used to say over the intercom: “A word to the wise should be sufficient”.
I could see at most a couple years’ salary and legal bills. That would be closer to 100K, not 2 million. With that kind of money, she wouldn’t have to work again for the rest of her life.