Jarretta Hamilton didn’t think anything of it when her Principal at Southland Christian School in St. Cloud, Florida, asked her whether she had conceived her then unborn child before or after her marriage. She told the truth – the child had been conceived about three weeks before her marriage to Samuel Treftz. A week later she was fired.
Hamilton, a 39 year old widow with five children from her previous marriage, was shocked when the school fired her. She and her husband were meeting with the principal to discuss the standard six weeks of maternity leave when the question came up.
“‘Well, I’m just trying to do the math here. When did you get married again?’” Hamilton recalled the principal asking, during a “Today” show interview today. “And then he said, ‘Well, did you conceive prior to marriage?’ And I answered and I told him yes. [His question] came out of nowhere,” she said.
Not only did the school fire her with in a week of discovering that she had conceived out of wedlock, they let everyone know why she’d been let go. ”They told the entire staff in a staff meeting that I had been fired and the reason why they let me go, and then they called all of the parents to my fourth-grade students and told them as well,” Hamilton said. “In fact, I had a number of parents call me because they were really upset about it and felt that my performance in the classroom was what mattered and not my personal life.”
The school claims that she was fired for “fornication, sex outside of marriage,” and that Hamilton agreed to abide by the schools values when she accepted her job. Hamilton maintains that she was not under contract and was never told that the school had a strict policy against premarital sex. According to her lawyers the firing violated federal anti-discrimination laws. Her suit is seeking compensation for lost pay and emotional distress as well as invasion of privacy because the school notified the community of why she was let go.
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