City Files Notice of Appeal in DiCapua v. City of New York

New York City attorneys filed a notice of appeal today, after a decision that ordered the reinstatement with back pay of 10 teachers who were fired under the Department of Education vax mandate.

I published a piece on the DiCapua decision earlier today in which I speculated that the City would let the 10 teacher reinstatements ordered in the decision stand. Shortly after that, my guess was proven wrong when the City did in fact file a notice of appeal.

Michael Kane from Teachers for Choice, one of the 10 teachers who won reinstatement, broke the news.

I was betting that the City’s attorneys would treat this case the way they’ve been handling some individual lawsuits that ended in decisions granting the petitioner a religious exemption but denying constitutional claims. I thought they would probably take Porzio’s decision on the constitutional claims, cut their losses when it came to the reinstatements and back pay, and move on.

But it seems the City lawyers made a different calculation. It may be that the precedent set by the 10 reinstated teachers opened the door to too many individual lawsuits for their taste, or another group effort. Maybe they just think the appeals court will be more likely to rule decisively in their favor than Judge Porzio was.

Whatever their reasons, they’ve filed their notice, putting the DiCapua petitioners in the same boat as the Garvey petitioners before them—waiting for an appeal date that the City will likely do its best to push far into the future.

Petitioners’ attorney Sujata Gibson spoke outside the Richmond County Courthouse in Staten Island after the September 6 DiCapua v. City of New York hearing, introduced by petitioner and Teachers for Choice founder Michael Kane.