Three Roanoke County school board members and the school superintendent have asked that a wrongful termination lawsuit brought against them by a county supervisor be dismissed.
In a memo filed Thursday with a motion to dismiss the case, the attorneys for board members Cheryl Facciani, Timothy Greenway and Brent Hudson and superintendent Kenneth Nicely claimed there’s no evidence that their actions contributed to the firing of part-time division employee Martha Hooker.
Hooker, a retired teacher in the division, also serves as vice chair of the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors.
Hooker began working part time as a work-based learning coordinator for Roanoke County schools in 2021. She was fired in May 2023, and she claimed in a November lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Roanoke that the school board had made the decision to terminate her.
The school board did not vote on the status of Hooker’s employment, but Hooker claims that after she was let go, her former supervisor and Nicely both indicated that the school board had wanted her fired.
Hooker’s case alleges that the school board pushed to fire her in retaliation for the way she voted as a county supervisor on funding several major school renovation and construction projects.
Attorney Matthew Black of Haney Phinyowattanachip education law firm in Richmond, which represents the four defendants, said in the memo Thursday that Hooker hasn’t alleged that any school board “policy or custom” caused her termination. In addition, “Hooker fails to allege facts sufficient to make out a claim of retaliation,” Black wrote.
The filing also asserts that as government officials, the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity, which “protects government officials from liability for civil damages… insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
No hearings have been scheduled in the case.