This story by Ann Schimke was originally published by Chalkbeat Colorado on October 8, 2026. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters
On her popular TikTok channel last year, a Colorado Springs teacher suggested parents keep their kids home from school during an upcoming one-day teacher strike. She cautioned that children attending school that day could end up in large classes staffed by central office employees with no teaching experience.
That social media post in the fall of 2025 was the start of a yearlong legal saga that led officials in Colorado Springs District 11 to remove Angelica Givler-Viers from her fifth grade classroom, recommend her firing, and after a judge’s recommendation last month, agree to retain her.
“I am super excited that I get to go back with the kids,” Givler-Viers told Chalkbeat.
More than two weeks after the school board’s vote on the matter, she’s still waiting to find out where she’ll be teaching and when the assignment will start.
The case, which pitted a union activist against a conservative-leaning school district that has become less union-friendly in recent years, raised questions about when employee free speech rights cross the line to insubordination and workplace disruption.
It also made clear the cost of adult conflict to students. The 10-year-olds in Givler-Viers’ class at McAuliffe Elementary watched as she was removed from the classroom on Oct. 6, 2025, just two months into the school year. They lost a veteran teacher with years of positive evaluations and, because of the rules of her administrative leave, never got the gift bags with snacks and books she later left for them.
Givler-Viers’ case, which started with an anonymous parent complaint about her social media posts, was handled through a process laid out by a state law called the Teacher Employment, Compensation and Dismissal Act. It involved a multi-day virtual court hearing in June with testimony from both sides.
Last month, Daniel Tom, an administrative law judge in the state’s Office of Administrative Courts, issued a 37-page recommendation in the case. He said Givler-Viers’ social media posts were “protected First Amendment speech” and that the district didn’t provide evidence that her comments were false or disrupted the school environment by lowering school attendance on the day of the strike.
He recommended the district retain Givler-Viers.
Tom cited testimony from a school psychologist working at McAuliffe during the strike that bore out some of what Givler-Viers had said in her Tik Tok post and three subsequent social media posts. The psychologist said the day was chaotic, students had more behavior issues than usual, and some central office employees who served as subs had never been in a classroom before.
He also noted that while McAuliffe Elementary had a higher absence rate than other schools in the same region of the district, five other district elementary schools had even higher absence rates that day.
The one-day strike, which was called to protest the loss of the teacher union’s collective bargaining agreement, didn’t cause safety problems, according to testimony cited in Tom’s recommendation.
One of the sticking points in the case was a provision in the district’s employee handbook that was added three weeks before the strike — after Givler-Viers took an August 2025 training to verify she understood the handbook. The new provision in the computer and social media use section said employees shouldn’t post “content that materially disrupts the school environment or interferes with the delivery of educational services.”
District officials cited that provision as part of the rationale for Givler-Viers’ removal.
Tom said in his opinion it’s possible that Givler-Viers only reviewed the earlier version of the handbook, not the one with the added provision about disrupting the school environment.
District officials said that employees were alerted about an FAQ addressing the change on September 15.
In his recommendation, Tom also found that a “no-contact” order barring Givler-Viers from district property and preventing her from interacting with students, parents, or district employees while she was on leave was “unconstitutionally overbroad.” He called various instances where she violated the order’s terms — stepping onto district property next to a public sidewalk while she gave a speech, for example — technical and trivial.
Tom’s opinion served as a non-binding recommendation to the District 11 school board. On September 23, the board voted 4-3 to allow Givler-Viers to return to the classroom on a probationary basis for one year. Board members indicated that she will also have to take training related to communication or respect in the workplace.
Givler-Viers, who said she did union work and read 135 books during her year on leave, said she would have preferred to be reinstated without probation — an option the board rejected in a 5-2 vote.
“This is not the perfect outcome … but this is kind of in the middle,” she said. “I can take trainings if it makes them happy.”
Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read the judge’s ruling in the original Chalkbeat article, here.