A teacher in Wisconsin has been fired from her job after she criticized her public school district’s decision to ban the song Rainbowland, which exalts the virtues of inclusivity, from a children’s concert at her campus.
The members of the board governing public schools in the solidly Republican community of Waukesha voted unanimously to dismiss Melissa Tempel from her job on Wednesday, saying the teacher’s defense of the Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton duet violated district policy because she did not speak to her supervisors first.
Tempel and her advocates, meanwhile, have maintained that she was exercising her constitutionally protected right to free speech but was punished because the song in question references rainbows, a key symbol of the LGBTQ+ community, according to reports from local television station WISN as well as other media outlets.
Her dismissal comes amid a fresh national wave of anti-LGBTQ+ action and rhetoric from political conservatives, including the US supreme court’s decision in late June to strike down a Colorado law compelling businesses and organizations there to treat same-sex couples equally.
The dispute pitting Tempel against the Waukesha district dates back to March, when the teacher expressed her frustration on Twitter that officials had blocked students at her school from singing Rainbowland during an upcoming concert that they were staging.
“When will it end?” wrote Tempel, who had taught classes in Spanish and English to students in first grade (the UK equivalent of year 2) at Heyer elementary school.
The tweet went viral and caused an uproar in some quarters. Leaders at the school defended the ban by pointing to a district policy which essentially prohibited “controversial issues in the classroom”.
But officials have declined to say why they considered Rainbowland to be controversial, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – a leading Wisconsin news outlet – reported. The song was reportedly replaced with Kermit the Frog’s differently themed Rainbow Connection.
Tempel’s superiors put her on leave in early April. And in May, she received notice that the school district’s superintendent – James Sebert – would recommend that the local education board fire her, setting the stage for a four-hour hearing on Wednesday over Tempel’s future.
According to WISN, at the hearing, Sebert asserted that Tempel “deliberately brought negative attention to the school district because she disagreed with the decision as opposed to following protocol and procedure”. He added: “I believe that behavior is intolerable.”
WISN reported that Tempel countered, “I thought that the fact that the tweet that I made – that Rainbowland wasn’t going to be allowed – was something that the public would be really concerned about and that they would be interested in knowing about it.”
The board’s vote to fire Tempel was 9-0.
A former US attorney in Wisconsin, James Santelle, told the Journal Sentinel that he believes the district’s policy which led to Tempel’s firing violates the American constitution’s first amendment, which protects free speech.
Tempel has said she intends to file a first amendment lawsuit against the Waukesha school district but has been deliberating which court to pursue her case in, according to the Journal Sentinel.
Waukesha is a city with about 71,000 inhabitants. The community also drew national attention in 2021, when a man intentionally drove a car into a crowd at a local Christmas parade, killing six people and wounding more than 60 others.
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