(Picture credit city of Fremont)
One month has passed since the Fremont City Council reversed course on a controversial personnel policy that had blocked homeschooled volunteer firefighter and state-licensed EMT Andrew Coates from applying for an entry-level opening with the city fire department.
But now a newly surfaced human resources email and an Oct. 2 job listing — which later was removed before being quietly reinstated — are adding to the drama, all under a cloud of threatened litigation.
As The Plains Sentinel reported earlier, Coates applied back in April for an entry-level firefighter/EMT opening with the Fremont Fire Department, but was turned down because his state-approved homeschool high school was unaccredited. This denial came despite promising qualifications: Coates had earned his state EMT license and was awarded Rookie of the Year at the Cedar Bluffs Suburban Fire District’s 2025 fire department banquet.
Emails from Fremont’s human resources director suggest that the city’s top HR official was looking to justify its inclination to toss out Coates’ application.
In an April 15, 2026 email obtained by The Plains Sentinel from a records request, Fremont human resources director Jennifer McDuffee wrote to a recipient whose name has been redacted, “Hello, I am reaching out to confirm information I received today from Beth Bolte. Based on our conversation, it is my understanding that employers are not required to accept a high school diploma from an exempt (rule 13) school and that it is up to the individual employer to make the determination if they will accept a diploma from an exempt school.”
The email establishes that McDuffee sought clarity from a state official, Beth Bolte, a program contact with the Nebraska Department of Education’s Exempt School [Home School] Program, about how employers may treat job applicants who graduated from Rule 13 exempt schools. These are state-approved high school arrangements but typically are unaccredited, unlike most public and private high schools.
The Plains Sentinel has reached out via email to McDuffee and Bolte for comment.
Fremont city council members had previously told The Plains Sentinel that the city’s initial language for the job listing made no mention of accreditation and that the city council did not necessarily have to change city policy in order for administrators to correct their oversight.
The city moved to officially change policy after McDuffee ghosted them.
Legal Action Still a Possibility
Meanwhile, the American Center for Law and Justice, the Christian public-interest firm that represents Coates and has threatened litigation from the earlier job denial, has complained that the city of Fremont appears yet again to be moving its goalposts when it comes to job requirements for the fire department.
“On October 2, after the city council removed the restriction against homeschool graduates, Fremont posted a new Firefighter/EMT or Paramedic position. But the city did not simply reopen the opportunity Andrew had been denied,” ACLJ executive director Jordan Sekulow wrote in an Oct. 16 article at Townhall.com.
“It deliberately established a different hiring process with different qualifications and a different competitive field,” Sekulow said, adding, “Now, Fremont has opened the position to experienced firefighters applying as lateral candidates. Those with at least two years of paid, full-time experience are exempt from the written examination, giving them an advantage that did not exist in Andrew’s original application process.”
When this Townhall posting initially came to The Plains Sentinel’s attention, however, the job listing in question was nowhere to be found on Fremont’s city employment page. The Plains Sentinel then reached out via email on October 21 to city officials including fire chief Todd Bernt and human resources director Jennifer McDuffee asking about the job listing. Neither Bernt nor McDuffee returned comment, while a city councilman replied by email to say he was not free to comment in light of ACLJ’s threatened lawsuit.
Days later, however, the city of Fremont re-posted the October 2 job listing that ACLJ’s Sekulow complained about, but it is unclear when exactly it went back online or why it was temporarily taken down in the first place.
For their parts, neither McDuffee nor Bernt have responded to followup email inquiries about the October job listing’s reposting.
Asked for further comment on the October job listing, a media rep with ACLJ told The Plains Sentinel that the organization “still represents Andrew and supports his continuing efforts to follow his dream of becoming a full time firefighter in his community.”
— Ken Shepherd is a freelance reporter with The Plains Sentinel. He is a former editor at Fox News Digital and the Washington Times.