Four Van Buren Public Schools teachers are suing the district, saying they were falsely accused of cheating on a state exam and their rights were violated when they were removed from the classroom and placed on paid administrative leave.

The four teachers — Pamela Bradley, Michelle Komaromi, Brent Held and Rebecca Tennis — filed the federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Detroit today. They say the district has yet to officially charge them with any wrongdoing.

Named in the lawsuit: the school district, former Van Buren Superintendent Michael Van Tassel and Shonta Langford-Green, who up until late April was the district’s interim superintendent. Also named are six of the seven members of the district’s Board of Education: Brent Mikulski, Martha Toth, Kathy Kovach, Kevin English, Alison Bennett and Kelly Owen. Board member Sherry Frazier was not named.

The suit alleges the defendants violated the teachers’ freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom to petition and due process rights.

The suit stems from an investigation into alleged testing improprieties at Savage Road Elementary School that has had the district embroiled in controversy for months and led to the exit earlier this year of Van Tassel.

District officials were not available for comment late Friday.

The plaintiffs in the suit were among five teachers at the school who were put on administrative leave in January after the district said an investigation found they inappropriately coached students during the M-STEP exam, in some cases alerting students if they answered a problem incorrectly and in other cases helping them come to the right answer.

While many students statewide struggled on the new exam, the Savage Road students posted what state officials said were abnormally high scores. They were sixth in the state on the math portion of the exam. And students at the school scored higher than a number of schools that educate only gifted and talented students.

Savage has a gifted program, but district officials have said that program accounts for 40% of its population.

Van Tassel alerted the state to what he thought were suspicious results last fall. The Michigan Department of Education told Van Tassel to conduct an investigation.

The teachers deny they cheated, and are asking to return to their jobs, have any disciplinary records removed from their personnel files, and be granted compensatory and punitive damages.

Deborah Gordon, the Bloomfield Hills attorney representing the teachers, said they’ve been out of the classroom for five months and have yet to be told what rule they broke.

“They’ve never been given anything in writing saying why they’re out. They have asked on several occasions what their status is and when they can return. They get no response. They have been left with no choice. They can continue to sit home at the taxpayer expense or they can try to get back into the classroom.”

Gordon said she believes district officials have backed themselves into “a very strange corner.”

“How do you keep people out who have not been disciplined or done anything wrong?”

The lawsuit said Van Tassel and all other defendants “intentionally misled the public,” stating publicly that defendants were engaged in an ongoing investigation into what was being referred to by January 2016 as the cheating scandal.

The lawsuit says the district will only allow the teachers to return to their jobs if they sign a document in which they would agreed to no further litigation against the district. The four rejected the offer. But the fifth teacher, who wasn’t named in the suit, signed an agreement and returned to work.