A Florida teacher under investigation because she showed her class the Disney animated movie Strange World, which features a gay character, has defended herself on social media, saying that the film is related to the curriculum and that state investigators were traumatizing her 10 and 11-year-old students.
Jenna Barbee, a teacher at Winding Waters school in Hernando County, Florida, released a six-minute TikTok video in which she gave her side of the story.
She said that she had been reported to the local school board by one of her students’ mothers, who sits on the board.
Photo: Reuters
Barbee, who is in her first year as a teacher, said she was reported to Florida Department of Education for “indoctrination” before anyone had even spoken to her.
She is now under official investigation for possibly contravening the Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed the “don’t say gay” law, which was introduced by Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last year, and which bans teaching about gender and sexual identity to school students of all ages .
In her TikTok statement, Barbee said she showed Strange World to her fifth-grade class to give them a break after a morning of exams.
Barbee saw the film as directly relevant to the curriculum they were studying on Earth science and ecosystems. She had signed permission slips from the parents of all pupils in the class, giving their approval for showing PG movies.
Disney released Strange World last year. The fictional plot centers on a team of explorers searching for a rare plant that provides energy for their society.
A central character in the animated film, Ethan Clade, who is played by the comic Jaboukie Young-White, is gay. He has a brief crush on another male character.
Barbee said that the sexual orientation of the character had nothing to do with her choice of film: “I have a lot of fifth-grade students who have come to me this year, long before showing this movie, talking about how they’re part of [the LGBTQ] community. It’s not a big deal to me. So I just said, OK, awesome, I’m not pushing anything, just being accepting. That’s what I do.”
Barbee said that as part of the investigation by the state’s education department, her pupils are now being taken out of class one by one to be interrogated by officials.
“Do you know the trauma that is going to cause to some of my students?” Barbee said. “Some of them can barely come and have a conversation with me, and are just getting comfortable with me, and now an investigator is allowed to come and interrogate them.”
On Sunday, the Tallahassee Democrat named the parent and board member who had reported Barbee as Shannon Rodriguez. A member of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, Rodriguez has been a leader of demands to have books she describes as “smut” and “porn” taken off library and school shelves.
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