Evangelical school sees discrimination in COVID-19 relief fund’s employee-counting rules.
Gordon College could be on the hook to repay $7 million of COVID-19 relief funds. A federal court rejected eight of the evangelical school’s arguments that it should be eligible for loan forgiveness.
Gordon’s lawyers made the case that the religious liberty protections in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act should allow the institution to count employees in a different way than the US Small Business Administration (SBA) said they had to be counted. The US district court in Washington, DC, rejected the argument, citing a lack of evidence.
“Plaintiff alleges no facts connecting its number of employees to any religious practice,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a ruling handed down in July. “Plaintiff fails to identify any ‘exercise of religion’ that has been burdened, and thus plaintiff’s claims can be dismissed on this basis alone.”
According to the government, Gordon has 639 employees on its wooded campus on the North Shore of Boston. Some of those people only work part time, however. So the school calculated the full-time equivalent, which is a common way to track enrollment in higher education. If you don’t tally individual people working at the school, but instead count units of time worked, Gordon only has 495.67 employees.
Organizations with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loan forgiveness.
The government gave out nearly $800 billion as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020. The vast majority of recipients have since had their debt waived. Gordon is an exception.
In court filings, the law firm Gammon and Grange said the SBA’s …
