Generally, an employment contract in writing will be enforced even if one of the contracting parties is a church or para-church organization. “A church is always free to burden its activities voluntarily through contracts, and such contracts are fully enforceable in civil court.” Mis v Fairfield College Preparatory School, Slip. Op., 2017 WL 3174422 (Sup. Conn. 2017) (unpublished) (quoting).

The Mis opinion was a trial court order overruling a Motion to Dismiss. Thus, the case continued and the opinion was not the final word. Also, in Connecticut, like most states, obtaining a dismissal is difficult because the factual record has not been developed through any discovery and the Court has only the Plaintiff’s pleading before it which must generally be treated as true regardless of whether it is true unless it is implausible.

In Mis, the Plaintiff was a tenured teacher. The school employment handbook contained a morals clause. For tenured faculty, it also contained a right to a hearing on involuntary termination. The Plaintiff during a school fundraiser was alleged by a church leader to have engaged in immoral conduct, the nature of which was not specified in the Court’s opinion. Upon termination, the teacher demanded the hearing accorded in the handbook. The hearing was conducted and the teacher was exonerated. But, the church terminated the Plaintiff. The opinion of the Court does not explain the reason the church disregarded or overruled the hearing finding, but the Plaintiff sued for breach of contract. The Plaintiff alleged the handbook constituted an employment contract.

One lesson of this opinion might be that a church school should not provide a right to a hearing if the church school does not want to be bound by the outcome of the hearing. Also, the whole concept of “tenure” generally acts to create a contract that has to be limited by specific language in the handbook or contract that would fit tenure to the church school circumstance.

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