Kathleen Hayes v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago

── Kathleen Hayes v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago ── Court: Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Date: May 28, 2026 Category: General In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 24-2890 KATHLEEN HAYES, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO and MATTHEW LYONS, Defendants-Appellants. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 21-cv-01198 — John F. Kness, Judge. ____________________ ARGUED MAY 14, 2025 — DECIDED MAY 28, 2026 ____________________ Before SYKES, JACKSON-AKIWUMI, and PRYOR, Circuit Judges. JACKSON-AKIWUMI, Circuit Judge. Kathleen Hayes, a col- lege administrator responsible for staffing student teachers with Chicago Public Schools, made several public comments disparaging the school district. Matthew Lyons, the school district’s Chief Talent Officer, notified Hayes’s supervisors about her comments and asked them to address the issue in 2 No. 24-2890 whatever manner they saw fit. The supervisors saw fit to ter- minate Hayes’s employment. Hayes then sued Lyons and the Board of Education of the City of Chicago for, among other claims, retaliation in viola- tion of the First Amendment. Lyons and the Board moved for summary judgment on several grounds including qualified immunity. The district court denied the motion. We see the issue largely as Lyons does, so we reverse. Even if we assume that Lyons violated Hayes’s First Amend- ment rights by complaining to her employer about her speech, no sufficiently analogous caselaw put Lyons on notice of this. Lyons therefore is entitled to qualified immunity and judgment as a matter of law. The Board, however, is not a proper party to this appeal, so we dismiss it from this appeal and leave the parties to sort their rights in district court. Lastly, because this appeal is not frivolous, we deny Hayes’s request under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38 to sanc- tion her opponents. I Kathleen Hayes was an administrator at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy from 2016 until her termination in 2020. In that role, Hayes placed Northwestern student teachers at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) sites. During the relevant period, Hayes was also a par- ent of a child enrolled in CPS, which is operated by the Board of Education of the City of Chicago. During her time at Northwestern, Hayes repeatedly wrote and endorsed criticisms of CPS on social media. In one post, Hayes condemned CPS’s CEO for “contradictory statements” about school breaks. In another post, Hayes denigrated CPS’s No. 24-2890 3 student information system using the phrase “#aspensucks.” In yet another, she commented on an article about a CPS school by asking, “it’s like, which CPS school will have a scan- dal this week?” Hayes also pointed out that state and federal officials “ha[d] given [CPS] a no-confidence vote on protect- ing kids from sexual abuse and ensuring special education students’ needs are met.” As a final example, Hayes circulated a petition calling for CPS to expand its investigation of and reporting on racial inequities in the school district. At least one CPS school principal saw Hayes’s posts and shared them with CPS’s Chief Talent Officer, Matthew Lyons. Soon after, on February 22, 2020, Lyons emailed Timothy Dohrer, Hayes’s direct supervisor, and David Figlio, then Dean of Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Pol- icy. In the email, Lyons expressed concern about “Hayes’ so- cial media usage and the impact that it [was] having on CPS.” He claimed that Hayes’s posts the past several months were interfering with CPS and Northwestern’s work by “dis