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| Alliance Defending Freedom |
‘If we don’t stand up for our freedoms at home, then when does it stop? If we just let it go, we’ll never stay free.’
Gady Youmans, a pastor who runs a Christian learning center in Georgia, believes Vidalia City Schools violated his First Amendment rights when they cut ties with his ministry over a Facebook post.In September 2025, the Vidalia City Board of Education proposed a property tax hike, which Youmans criticized in a few now-deleted Facebook posts. Citing the Facebook posts as evidence of his “misalignment” with the school board, the superintendent told Youmans they would be ending their partnership with his released-time education program called Sweet Onion Christian Learning Center.
Youmans had no idea that his program, which has served hundreds of students in the area as a non-profit religious ministry, had been under investigation by the school for months. This prompted Youmans to partner with Alliance Defending Freedom to sue Vidalia City Schools for violating his First Amendment rights.
“If I had done something wrong, I wanted to seek reconciliation,” Youmans told The Federalist. “But I just realized as I started to get [legal help], wow, this wasn’t just a mistake. This wasn’t just a wrong decision. I didn’t realize how constitutionally protected my ministry and the work I do actually was.”
Gady Youmans is an ordained Southern Baptist pastor at Word of Life Baptist Church in Vidalia, Georgia, with a wife and three kids at home. On weekdays, he runs a released-time education program which offers free, optional religious classes for students in the Vidalia school system.
Early in his career, Youmans was a chaplain for a public school football team, a substitute teacher, and was heavily involved with Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He started his current ministry in 2013, inspired by a missionary couple who introduced him to the concept of a released-time education program, which allows students to sign out of school and go off campus for religious or vocational instruction. The Sweet Onion Christian Learning Center has offered elective classes in religion, financial literacy, psychology, and comparative religion.
“I realized if I could get the Bible in public schools in a community where, unless you have private school tuition, you’re not getting a Christian education, then I’d be able to extend the ministry of the Church into the public school system in a legal way,” Youmans said.
His ministry was interrupted in February 2026, when he received an email from Superintendent Sandy Reid informing him that the school was canceling his ministry’s connection with Vidalia Schools. The school took Sweet Onion’s classes off of their course offerings, putting the center at risk of losing all their private funding and ending many students’ only access to religious education.
Reid claimed that the school board took offense to his Facebook posts, which justified barring their students from access to free religious education, according to the ADF. She also admitted that a teacher who made the same posts would not have been fired.
“It was a gut punch,” Youmans said. “Realizing a ministry that has built up and ministered to hundreds of students in the community over the years, and to their families by proxy, was just over. As I found out why it was happening, it was even worse.”
According to the ADF, one of Youmans’ controversial Facebook posts shared publicly available data which showed that the 20 highest-paid school district employees made a combined $2.2 million in 2024, which backed up another post suggesting the district cut excess administrative positions to save money rather than raising taxes. --->READ MORE HERE
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