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(LifeSiteNews) — Barrington Public Schools in Rhode Island is offering to rehire and pay tens of thousands of dollars to a trio of teachers it fired for refusing COVID-19 vaccination, in another victory for religious liberty and conscientious objection.

Legal Insurrection, which has been following the case, reports that Brittany DiOrio, Stephanie Hines, and Kerri Thurber had requested but been denied religious exemptions from the districts vaccine mandate, then were suspended without pay and ultimately fired in January 2022. They took the district to court, and ultimately prevailed.

“The three teachers have the opportunity to return to teaching positions within the Barrington School District should they choose to do so, at the steps they would have been at had they worked continuously,” the district announced May 11. “Each individual will receive a payment of $33,333, along with back payments: Stephanie Hines ($65,000), Kerri Thurber ($128,000), and Brittany DiOrio ($150,000). Attorney fees totaling $50,000 will be paid to the teachers’ legal counsel.”

At the same time, Barrington maintains that it “was navigating an unprecedented health pandemic and leaned on the important recommendations by the CDC and the Rhode Island Department of Health to ensure the safety of our students and school community. Our then-policy helped combat the pressing public health crisis of the time, while keeping schools open, and one that nearly all faculty adhered to.”

Despite the face-saving statement, the settlement is a full victory for the plaintiffs.

“The teachers have been made whole. It is as if they were never fired,” their attorney Greg Piccirilli says. “They’ve shown amazing resilience to stick by their faith. A lot of other people with similar situations have gone through this. And hopefully [this resolution] will serve as an example of how others should be vindicated the same way, for sticking up for what they believe in.”

“As our medical expert Dr. Andrew Bostom has proven, and the CDC and RIDOH have admitted since July of 2021, the COVID-19 vaccine does not stop transmission. It is against medical science to mandate such an experimental drug, particularly for younger healthy people such as these teachers who are at practically no risk from the disease,” Piccirilli added in a statement to Fox News. “That these teachers all were previously infected with COVID-19 and therefore had natural immunity also evidenced the lack of need for them to have the shot.”

He also noted it was “particularly troubling” that the Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association, the union of which all three teachers were members, “refused to represent them.” Separate claims against NEA Rhode Island “for breach of duty of fair representation and religious discrimination are still pending and are not part of this settlement.”

Evidence supports the doubts that many Americans continue to harbor about the safety and the necessity of the COVID-19 shots, which were developed and released under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting system (VAERS) reports 35,324 deaths, 199,790 hospitalizations, 19,546 heart attacks, and 26,928 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of May 5. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers, despite common insistence to the contrary. Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the U.S. Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).

Last September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland which found that the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”

In December 2022, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) hosted a roundtable discussion during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7 percent, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “Twenty-five percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”

Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published last December in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students — a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus — do far more harm than good: “per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation).”

Additionally, many harbor moral objections to taking the shots due to the use of cells derived from aborted babies in their creation.

According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used aborted fetal cells during their vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design and development and production phases. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science and even the left-wing “fact-checking” outlet Snopes have also admitted the vaccines’ abortion connection.

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