VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. — Principal Lauren Dressback didn’t think about it after it happened. After all, she was workplace-close with Wesley Smith, the custodian at Cahaba Heights Elementary School, in this affluent suburb of Birmingham. She called him “the mayor.” She said that he knew her two children, asked about her family almost daily and made a point of interacting. “Every day, a huge bear hug,” she recalled.  

So, when Dressback, just after last Valentine’s Day, asked Smith to come into the nurse’s office and shut the door, and then shared three photos on her phone of who she had just started dating, it felt ordinary. Afterward, she said, “I just moved right on about my day.” 

But the 2 minute, 13 second-exchange — captured on video by the nurse — would prove fateful.  

In a few short months, after a two-decade career, Dressback, a popular educator, would go from Vestavia Hills City school district darling to controversial figure after she came out as gay, divorced her husband, and began dating a Black woman.  

Within days of showing the custodian the photos, she was ordered to leave the building and was barred from district property. Soon, she found herself facing a litany of questions from district leaders about a seemingly minor issue: employee timesheets. In April, she was officially placed on administrative leave. On May 2, during a packed school board meeting, she was demoted, replaced as principal, and sent to run the district’s alternative high school. 

At that school board meeting, as he had for weeks, Todd Freeman, the superintendent, refused to offer an explanation, even to Dressback. Rather, at the beginning of the meeting, he read a statement that “we have not, cannot, and will not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin or disability.” (When contacted, Vestavia Hills City Schools spokesperson Whit McGhee said the district would not discuss confidential personnel matters and declined to make Freeman available for an interview. He provided links to school board meeting minutes, district policies and Alabama educator codes without explaining how they applied in Dressback’s case. Freeman and two other district officials involved in the situation did not respond to emails requesting interviews or a list of detailed questions.) 

Despite Freeman’s assertion regarding personnel decisions, many people in the community believe differently. So many, in fact, that “the Dressback situation” has lit up social media (one TikTok post has more than 313,000 views), spurred supermarket conversations and online chatter — and challenged allegiances.  

“The entire situation has divided the community,” said Abbey Skipper, a parent at Cahaba Heights Elementary. Some people, she said, are “trying to label everyone who is on the side of Dressback as leftists or Democrats or radicals” and assuming “everyone who supports the superintendent and the board is a Republican — which isn’t true.”  

A private Facebook group, “We Stand With Lauren” quickly gathered 983 members, while a public Facebook post by a fifth grade teacher at Cahaba Heights complained of the “news frenzy and whirlwind of social media misinformation” and stated that, “We Stand for Our Superintendent, Our District Office, Our Board, and our new principal, Kim Polson.” The May 8 teacher post, which got 287 likes and 135 comments, both in support and challenging the post, went on to say, “To do our jobs to the best of our ability, we trust the people who have been charged to lead us.”  

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Alabama has among the strictest anti-gay policies in the nation. This past legislative session, the House passed a bill to ban LGBTQ+ flags and symbols from schools. It also expands to middle schools the current “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits instruction or discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary schools. Its sponsor, Rep. Mack Butler, who represents a suburban community in northeast Alabama, stated that it could “purify the schools just a little bit.” He later walked back the comment. The bill died in the Senate, but Butler has vowed to reintroduce it next session. 

The bill was one of dozens introduced or passed in states around the country restricting classroom discussion of gender identity, books with LGBTQ+ characters and displays of pride symbols. The laws have contributed to a climate in which “every classroom has been turned into a front” in a battle, said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ+ individuals in K-12 education. “Every educator, every administrator now has to be on that front line every single day,” she said. “We’re seeing educators leave because of the strain of the job made worse by the political moment we’re in and we’re also seeing because of the political moment we’re in, educators being targeted for their personal identity.” 

Tiffany Wright, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania who studies the experience of LGBTQ+ educators, said right now many “are very on edge.”* Wright and her colleagues have surveyed LGBTQ+ educators four times since 2007, with new 2024 data to be released in November. While the past decade has seen strides toward acceptance, “the regional differences are huge,” she said. “Folks in the South definitely felt less safe being out to their communities and students.” November’s presidential and statewide elections could yield even sharper differences in LGBTQ+ protections between red and blue states.  

While quite a few states long had laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, it took a 2020 Supreme Court decision, Bostock v. Clayton County, to bring such protections to Alabama. That changed landscape spurred Dressback to engage lawyer Jon Goldfarb, who filed a complaint alleging work-based discrimination with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating. This fall, he expects to file a separate federal civil rights complaint. In 30 years of practice in Alabama, Goldfarb said, “I’ve had a lot of people that have come to me and complain about being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.” Until Bostock, he would tell them, “There is nothing we can do.” 

A review of Dressback’s personnel file shows no reprimands until June, when she received an evaluation questioning her professional conduct that followed her filing the EEOC complaint. This raises a question: Why was she removed?  

Dressback’s situation, however, is about more than the law. It also challenges her place in the white Christian, predominantly conservative community she grew up in, belongs to and loves. And it offers a test case in a divided political time: Will her removal and the outcry that followed harden partisan alignments — or shake them? Even in Alabama, a Pew Research Center survey shows, more than one-third of those who lean Republican say homosexuality should be accepted. 

Brian DeMarco, a local attorney and high school classmate of Dressback’s, was sporting bright print swim trunks, a T-shirt and a Vestavia Hills baseball cap when we met at the public swimming pool where he’d brought his kids. We sat at a picnic table; the squeals of children released to the joys of summer carried in the warm Alabama air. He said he understands why some people may not be comfortable with a gay elementary school principal. 

“Her coming out as an educator, being around children, I think that frightens people, certain people all over the country,” he said. And in the South, in a conservative town, “it does become a bigger issue to people.” Politically, DeMarco tends “to swing right,” but sent Dressback a message of support on Facebook. “Everybody that knows Lauren  knows she is a good person,” he said. 

In fact, Dressback’s case has spurred public outrage because so many people do  know her. She attended Vestavia Hills Public Schools — Class of 1997 — and her mother, now retired, was a popular high school English teacher and yearbook adviser. She followed her parents into education (her father was a geography professor) and returned to teach social studies at the high school.  

In 2015, she was named secondary teacher of the year; in 2017, the graduating class dedicated the yearbook to her. She moved into administration and advanced; in 2022 she was appointed principal of Cahaba Heights Elementary School. She was awarded a three-year contract, effective July 2023, following a probationary year. In December — weeks before she was told to gather her things and was escorted off school grounds — she was given a positive write-up by an assistant superintendent who observed her running a meeting of teachers about the school’s “core values.” 

It also matters that this story is unfolding in Vestavia Hills. The city’s motto is “A Life Above,” and the municipal website declares that it “exemplifies the ideals of fine southern hospitality.” The community was born as a post-World War II subdivision and incorporated in 1950 with 3,000 residents (it now has 38,000). It is an effortfully attractive place with well-kept painted brick homes and clipped lawns. It is named for Vestavia, the exotic estate of former Birmingham Mayor George C. Ward whose Roman-inspired home was here. The 1930s-era news accounts describe lavish parties with male servers draped in togas. 

Vestavia Hills is also one of the “over the mountain” suburbs of Birmingham. When you drive over Red Mountain out of the urban core with its reminders of steelmaking and jazz, of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Negro Leagues, away from streets where shabbily dressed men push wheeled contrivances, where pride flags fly and breweries sprout, where drag queens coexist with affirming churches, you enter a different world. Birmingham is a Black city; Vestavia Hills is 86 percent white.  

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And like surrounding white suburbs of Mountain Brook, Homewood and Hoover, Vestavia Hills competes on lifestyle, including its public schools. Alabama is hardly an education leader, yet the four districts earn mention in U.S. News rankings. Church is also central to life here; biographies for public officials name which they attend.  

“You move a child into the school system, there’s two questions they’re asked,” Julianne Julian, a resident and another Dressback high school classmate, said when we met at a coveted rear table inside the Diplomat Deli, a popular Vestavia Hills lunch spot. “Who are you for as far as football — Alabama? Auburn? — and what church do you go to?” 

Teams matter in Vestavia Hills — the high school’s in particular. The district itself was founded in 1970 amid federal desegregation orders, when residents broke away from the Jefferson County Schools and agreed to pay an extra tax. They adopted the Rebel Man in Civil War military uniform as the district’s mascot. Dressback’s 1996 junior year high school yearbook includes a photo of students at a rally waving massive Confederate flags. “It was just kind of the way we were growing up,” said DeMarco, who in high school displayed a Confederate flag on his Nissan pickup. “It was just kind of cool.” 

It wasn’t until 2015 that the district considered changing the mascot. After contentious public meetings in which some argued that the mascot and flag were not racist — a point ridiculed by John Oliver on national television — the district chose to adopt the 1Rebel rebrand. (Mess with one Rebel and you mess with us all, is the concept. They are still called “The Rebels,” but simply use the letters “VH.”) 

When I met with Dressback, days after school let out, she answered the door to her apartment wearing a T-shirt that read “love. empathy. compassion. inclusion. justice. kindness.” She looked like she could use every one of those things.  

She was welcoming, but said she was nervous about talking. She had not spoken publicly since she was escorted out of Cahaba Heights Elementary in February. We sat at her dining table — I brought an Italian sub, no onions or peppers, hot, from Diplomat Deli, Dressback’s regular order — and in our conversations then and later, she appeared to believe the best about people. 

Others in Vestavia clearly believe the best about her: Since things erupted, her phone has pinged with messages, including from former students. “Thank you for making an impact on my life,” said one of the many that she shared with me. “You stood up for me in class when someone made fun of me for having depression and I’ll never forget that,” wrote another. And, “you may not remember me, but I had you as a teacher during my time at VHHS and even when I was not your student, I still saw you as a person who cared for all students, not just the ones on your roster.” (Dressback said she has “not received any negative messages. Not one.”) 

At Cahaba Heights, parents noticed her gift for calming children with behavior issues. A mother of twins who got tripped up by transitions (drop-off is “the hardest part of our morning”) said that, with Dressback greeting them at the curb, “We didn’t have that struggle this year at all.” Sometimes Dressback would slip on a wig or costume — Santa, Minion, astronaut, among others; before winter breaks she donned an elf outfit and climbed atop the brick marquee in front of the school to the delight of arriving children and passing cars. She wanted to remind everyone that school is fun. 

“Her love for the children just reached every square inch of the school,” said Skipper, the Cahaba Heights parent of a second grader who moved to the neighborhood specifically for the school. Her removal “plunged me into grief. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I lost weight. The amount of upset was palpable. I loved her. She loved my child.” 

As we sat at her dining table, Dressback shared that she sensed she was gay in high school but said that “it sort of felt clear to me that I couldn’t have that life here.” The only gay people she knew well were two family members. When her Uncle Dennis died of complications from HIV and her cousin Robyn died by suicide, as upset as she was, being out was tough to imagine.  

The tragedies coincided with her time at Samford University, the private Baptist college where her father taught. “It’s one of the most religiously conservative schools in the nation,” she said. “You go to Samford to not be different.” And it was there in a geography class that she met Shane Dressback, when the two arrived early one day and “started chit-chatting.” They were engaged the next year, and married in January 2001, just after her December graduation. 

“I met Shane and did very genuinely fall in love with him,” she said. “He is a wonderful man.” They had two children —  Kaylee graduated from college in May and is playing semi-pro soccer, and Tyler is a senior in high school — and were consumed with family life. But then, as she approached becoming an empty nester, Dressback began having panic attacks around being gay, she said, feeling that “I’ve pushed this down for a really long time.”  

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This past December, she came out to Shane. They didn’t speak for more than 24 hours. Then, she texted him to say she was going to church. Minutes after the service began, she told me, “He texted me and said, ‘I’m here. May I come sit by you?’ So, we sat together at this church service. Both of us cried the whole way through it.” 

Shane Dressback told me that he struggled with the news. On one of his worst days, however, he said that God told him to love her “no matter what.” The next day, he told Lauren, “I was going to love her unconditionally and unconventionally.” The marriage ending was painful, but they remain close. “I know she loved me for 23 years,” he said. “There was nothing fake there.”  

The two held hands as they told their children and parents. They divorced, sold their home and rented apartments near one another. They still have family dinners and Shane cooks; leftovers of “Daddy’s Jambalaya” were in the refrigerator of Lauren Dressback’s apartment when I visited. Kaylee came by with her goldendoodle, Dixie, to grab a helping for lunch. 

Throughout Dressback’s ordeal with the school district, Shane has been her defender. “Lauren is a child of God and should be treated as such,” he said, as we sat at a friend’s brewery during off-hours. He knows her to be professionally excellent; her personal life should not matter. “It was no one’s business what was going on in our bedroom beforehand and I don’t think that’s anybody’s business now,” he said. “People have drawn a line in the sand where I think it needs to be more about, you know, loving people as Jesus did.” 

Shane was the one who urged Dressback to attend a brunch in early February organized by members of a LILLES Facebook group, which connects later-in-life lesbians. There she met her girlfriend, Angela Whitlock, a former medical operations officer in the U.S. Army and law student (she graduated in May). The two began a relationship that appears to charm and steady Dressback. At a dinner during my visit, they held hands under the table.  

Dressback says she came out to Freeman, the superintendent, at the end of a one-on-one meeting in January in the spirit of transparency. But the incident that appears central to Dressback’s removal unfolded just after Valentine’s Day, when Dressback asked Smith, the custodian, to come into the office of nurse Julie Corley, whom she described as a close friend at the time, and “close the door.”  

Dressback said it was Corley’s idea to show Smith the photos to see his reaction. He was in the lunchroom near Corley’s office. The brief exchange between Dressback and Smith was captured on video. (Dressback said she did not initially notice Corley filming, but did not stop her when she did, something she now regrets.) Corley did not respond to several interview requests by email and text, and, when reached by phone, said she was not interested in speaking and hung up. Dressback said she has not had any communication with Corley since being removed. 

“You shared something about your past, I was going to share something with you,” Dressback says to Smith in the video. “Do you want to see a picture of who I’m dating?” She and Whitlock had had their third date on Feb. 14. He says reflexively, “Shane?” She responds, “He’s my ex-husband.” Smith appears surprised. “April Fool?” and asks how long they were married. She says, “23 years.” He expresses disbelief. “You and him broke up?” Dressback holds out her phone to show a photo of her and Whitlock. 

“Who the hell is this? I mean, Who is this?” he asks. Several times Smith states that he doesn’t believe it. She hands him her phone. “Bullshit!” he exclaims as he looks at the three photos. “Stop lyin’!” There is one of Whitlock kissing Dressback on the cheek, one with their faces cheek to cheek and one in which they are sitting at a bar with Dressback’s arms around Whitlock, their noses touching. Smith then says, “Wow, I’m sorry,” and pulls her into a hug. “Once you go Black, baby, you don’t go back,” he quips. She groans at his attempt at humor.  

Dressback’s lawyer said that an affidavit the district obtained from Smith “appears to be in conflict on several points with what the video shows,” including a claim that he was made uncomfortable by the encounter. When reached by phone, Smith insisted, “I made no type of statement” even as district officials were “coming at me” seeking to query him, he said. “I hadn’t talked to nobody about the incident.”  

(McGhee, the school district spokesperson, declined to provide answers to specific questions, including regarding the apparent affidavit from Smith.)  

Days after Dressback shared the photos, on the morning of Feb. 23, Meredith Hanson, the district’s director of personnel, and Aimee Rainey, the assistant superintendent who had given Dressback the positive write-up in December, arrived at Cahaba Heights for a surprise meeting. Dressback said they told her that someone had complained that she shared “explicit” details of her relationship at a meeting with teachers. Dressback knew that to be untrue. “I kind of relaxed because I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that absolutely did not happen,’” she recalled. 

They questioned her in a way she found confusing. She asked for details of the complaint, but was told, “You know, ‘explicit.’ And I’m like, I know what ‘explicit’ means. Like are you going to tell me what they said I said or what?” They asked if she showed Smith photos of her and her girlfriend. She said she did. Meanwhile, she observed to me later, “There is a picture of Shane and me kissing on our lips at our wedding on the bookshelf right behind them.” (Hanson and Rainey did not respond to interview requests or to a list of detailed questions for this story.) 

Dressback says she was then told to gather her belongings, and that she was being placed on “detached duty,” requiring that she work from home. She was barred from school property. She was escorted from the building, which she said made her feel “like a criminal.” She expected to be gone for a few days.  

But several days later, Dressback was informed of a new problem: timesheets. In January, she had met with staff to remind them about clocking in and out (everyone must clock in, and paraprofessionals must clock out during lunch).  

On March 4, while still barred from the Cahaba Heights campus, Dressback met with Freeman, Rainey and Hanson in the conference room at the central office to discuss timesheets. Two days later, she was told that the following morning, March 7, she was to fire two employees for irregularities on their timesheets. One, she knew, had an attendance problem. She said that she had already discussed with Hanson not renewing him at the end of the school year.  

The other was a close friend, Stefanie Robinson, a paraprofessional who worked with students with severe disabilities, including those requiring help with feeding and diapering. Robinson often stayed in the classroom during her lunch breaks to aid the special education teacher because one student had as many as 30 seizures a day. When I met Robinson at her home, she acknowledged to sometimes forgetting to clock out or in, or not being able to do so if she was attending to a child’s needs. “If I’m in a massive diaper situation, I’m not going to remember to clock out, or if I’m helping a kid that’s having a seizure or, you know, one that’s in crisis,” Robinson told me.  

What most upset Robinson, however, was that shortly after Dressback was escorted out of the school and placed on “detached duty,” requiring she work from home, Robinson faced 45 minutes of questioning by Hanson and Rainey about Dressback’s dating life that she says “felt like an interrogation.” After confirming that she and Dressback were close, Robinson says she was asked questions such as, “When Lauren goes on a date, what does she say happens? And I was like, ‘What do you mean? What do you want to know?” They pressed: “Well, when she goes on a date and the date ends, what does she say happens after that?” Robinson insisted, “I don’t ask her how her date ended.”  

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On March 7 at 5:58 a.m., Robinson received a text from Hanson asking her “to start your day at the Board of Education” instead of Cahaba Heights. As soon as she arrived at the central office, she saw Dressback in the room; Dressback said Freeman had told her to fire Robinson. “I could tell she’d been crying,” said Robinson. “And I just smiled at her, I was like, ‘It’s OK.’” Robinson recalled Dressback saying, “in the most robotic tone, ‘It’s my recommendation to the board that your contract be terminated immediately.’” 

She hugged Dressback, told her she loved her, and left. Robinson texted the parent of one of her students, a second grade girl who is nonverbal, uses a wheelchair and has cerebral palsy and epilepsy. The girl’s mom, Payton Smith, no relation to Wesley, told me that she’d appreciated how Dressback had welcomed her child to the school a few years earlier. The principal had asked, “‘What do we need to do to make your kid feel comfortable?’ and recognized her as a child,” and not a set of legal educational requirements to meet, Smith recalled. Despite Robinson’s key role in her daughter’s education, Smith said she was not officially notified until March 19 — nearly two weeks later — via email that “Mrs. Robinson is no longer working at VHECH,” district shorthand for Cahaba Heights. 

Yet an email of district documentation shared with me states the date of Robinson’s leaving as April 5, and said that she had resigned. Nonetheless, the district continued to pay her for the rest of the school year, which she said felt “like I was being paid off because they knew what they did was wrong.” She is now a clinical research data coordinator for University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. (Neither McGhee, the district spokesperson, nor Hanson, in charge of HR, responded to email requests seeking comment on why Robinson was fired, the claim that she had resigned, or the discrepancy in her pay.)  

Meanwhile, on March 13, Dressback emailed Freeman asking to be reinstated to her position at Cahaba Heights, immediately. “I believe the action the system has taken against me is discrimination because of my sexual orientation, my interracial relationship, and my gender,” she wrote. The next day, Goldfarb, her lawyer, filed the EEOC complaint. (He later amended it to allege additional discrimination and that the district had retaliated against her for the filing.)  

On April 18, Dressback received a letter signed by Freeman officially placing her on administrative leave. It states that she is “not to contact any employees of the Vestavia Hills Board of Education related to your or their employment or relationship with the Vestavia Hills City Schools.” The letter does not state a reason for the action. 

As a result, to parents and some educators, Dressback seemed to have vanished. “I thought like, ‘Oh, I bet she’s sick. That’s really sad,’” said Lindsay Morton, a Cahaba Heights parent, a reaction echoed by others. Then, on April 27, two of Dressback’s classmates from high school posted videos on social media.  

“Where is Principal Dressback???” a schoolmate and friend, Karl Julian, titled a video on his YouTube channel. It has been viewed more than 11,000 times. Lauren Pilleteri Reece, who as laurenpcrna has 228.7K followers on TikTok, posted several videos narrating Dressback’s battle; the first has more than 313,000 views and 3,400 comments. Reece has known Dressback since high school. 

When the Vestavia Hills School Board called a meeting five days later, on May 2, to take up Dressback’s employment, everyone seemed to know about it. People rallied outside the district headquarters holding posters with messages such as “We Stand with Principal Dressback” and “Love is Love.” Many people wore green, Dressback’s favorite color, to signal support. Local TV and news reporters showed up.  

The room thrummed with emotion. There were angry, even tearful Cahaba Heights Elementary parents, teachers and retired teachers, students, former classmates and others who knew Dressback, plus some who didn’t know her. “I’ve never met her, I just know she had been wronged,” said Jim Whisenhunt, an advertising executive whose children, now grown, attended Vestavia Hills public schools.  

Dressback, fearing that she could not keep her composure, did not attend. Those who did attend had a lot to share. But before public comments were permitted or a vote was taken, Freeman read the prepared statement in which he said he wanted “to address, in general, personnel decisions made by the board.” He went on to say that they “have not, cannot, and will not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, or disability” and that “all of our decisions are vetted thoroughly and thoughtfully.” He added that “district employees contribute to academic excellence and are committed to our mission to provide every child in our schools the opportunity to learn without limits.” Then, over the objections of many in the audience who demanded a chance to comment before a vote was taken, the board officially transferred Dressback from Cahaba Heights Elementary to the alternative school.  

When public comments began, the outrage was obvious. “We may color outside of your lines a little bit, but coloring outside of your lines at no point does that ever mean that we are unprofessional. Lauren did not become unprofessional overnight,” said a charged-up Reece, who also came out as an adult. “You started looking at her as unprofessional overnight.”  

Rep. Neil Rafferty, a Democrat who represents Birmingham, stated that he “felt compelled to drive straight here” after “a long week in Montgomery” even though it is not his district. “We are all watching this. It is not just a Vestavia Hills issue anymore,” said Rafferty, the only openly gay member of the Alabama Legislature. The action, he said, signals “to your students who might be LGBTQ that they don’t matter.” 

Rev. Julie Conrady, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Churches of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, and president of a local interfaith group, stood up to speak. “You are sending her a message that in Vestavia Hills it is not OK to be LGBTQ,” she told the board and superintendent. “You should not be punished in your job in 2024 because of who you love.” Conrady, in black liturgical robe and green stole, told the crowd “that there are consequences here for all these people. I want you to get pictures of every single name and vote them the hell out!” (The school board is appointed by the City Council, not elected.) 

Another speaker, Allison Black Cornelius, who said she was “a conservative Republican,” focused on what seemed to make this issue explode: the silence. The superintendent and board had given no explanation, even to Dressback, as to why she was removed and now demoted, she said. “When you wait this long,” said Cornelius, “it puts this person in this black cloud.” 

Her point underscored a question others raised at the meeting to a board that largely remained silent: If Dressback did something so egregious as to require she be escorted from school and barred from district property, why was she suitable to lead the alternative school? The district declined to answer this question. 

The division, so apparent at that meeting, seemed to only harden a few weeks later during the board’s annual meeting on May 28. A group supporting the board and superintendent appeared in blue T-shirts and applauded after the board gave Freeman a new four-year contract that included a raise to $239,500 (he was paid $190,000 when he was hired in 2018) plus perks. Dressback supporters in green again spoke, sharing their frustration.  

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This is not the first time Vestavia Hills City Schools have made unpopular personnel moves. In August 2020, Tyler Burgess, a well-loved bow-tied principal, was removed as head of the high school and assigned to oversee remote learning during Covid, when many classes were online; the board voted not to renew his contract in March 2021. Students organized a protest; 3,134 people signed a petition calling for his reinstatement. The board and superintendent did not provide an explanation for their decision. Burgess, who has a doctorate in education, is now director of learning and development at a large construction firm. He did not respond to multiple interview requests. 

Danielle Tinker came to Vestavia Hills after more than a dozen years in Birmingham and Jefferson County schools, first as assistant principal at Liberty Park Elementary. In spring 2021, she was selected as principal of Cahaba Heights. From the start, Tinker, who is Black, felt unwelcome at the school where the teaching staff was nearly all white, she told me when we met for lunch. The day she was introduced as the new principal, a staff member emailed her, saying that “Cahaba Heights is a family” and that “today was hard on this family,” according to a copy of the email that she shared with me. Tinker said she was told by staff that the faculty had wanted a different principal; a later inquiry confirmed that staff felt “blindsided” when she was selected over that individual. 

As principal, Tinker raised questions with Rainey, the assistant superintendent, over student articles in a fall 2021 newsletter, including two about race. They were titled “Anti-Racist Kids: Leading the Way to New Beginnings” and “Learning About Racism: How It Can Change Lives.” Tinker told me she feared those articles would be “more fluff than addressing the actual challenge” with claims such as “Racism is part of our lives, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we are the ones ending it.” Rainey agreed to pause publication of the newsletter, which she said upset several teachers who wanted it published.  

On Dec. 16, 2021, several hours after Tinker told teachers that publication was being paused, Tinker emailed Hanson raising an “employee concern” after one of the teachers “stormed down the hallway” and was “pointing at me and yelling,” according to a copy of Tinker’s email exchanges that she shared with me. The next day, Tinker received a letter from Freeman stating that he was recommending she be transferred to the alternative school, effective Jan. 3. In March, Tinker filed a complaint of racial discrimination with the EEOC and resigned, using her remaining personal time to cover her pay for the remainder of the school year. In February 2023, she and the district reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount. She is using the money to attend law school. (McGhee, the district spokesperson, did not answer questions about Tinker or Burgess; Rainey and Hanson also did not respond.) 

On my last day in town in early June, Dressback gave me a guided tour of Vestavia Hills. We met inside the Diplomat Deli; Reece, Dressback’s high school classmate with the large TikTok following, joined us. As we walked out, Dressback, wearing a Care Bears T-shirt, showed off a new tattoo on her left forearm. In typewriter font it reads, “Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.” 

I slid into the passenger seat of her car, a red Buick Encore whose license plate reads “DBACK.” Reece hopped in back. An order of fries from Milo’s, a favorite Dressback fast-food spot since high school, leaned in a cup holder. Soon, we passed places they hung out as kids, schools they attended, new neighborhoods and old, the spot at Vestavia Country Club with a panoramic view where kids still take prom photos.  

The discussion jumbled together past and present, reminding these childhood friends — both of whom came out as adults — how much has changed. And how much has not. When we reached Vestavia Hills High School, Dressback stopped near a small sign at sidewalk level that reads “Alternative Placement” with an arrow. I descended metal stairs that span a rocky embankment; the alternative school, Dressback’s new assignment, is subterranean, its entrance nearly hidden from view. If architecture can relay shame, it might look like this. 

Yet when I returned to the car, Dressback told me she saw the alternative school as an opportunity rather than an exit. The school has often operated without a principal (Tinker never stepped inside or interacted with students, partly because of the Covid pandemic). At that late May school board meeting, Freeman could not say how many pupils attend the school. But Dressback was struck by what DeMarco, her classmate, told her. As a student, he spent time at the alternative school; he could have used someone like her. 

“I’m not gonna just go and sit and read a book. I can’t do that,” Dressback said, as she pulled out of the high school driveway. She wanted to make it a place less about punishment and more about connecting with kids for whom the traditional school is not a fit. It should not be a dumping ground for educators or for kids, she said. “My mindset is I’m gonna go and I’m gonna make this the best damn alternative school in the state.” 

In other words, Dressback is not willing to let go or to disappear. Yet “the Dressback situation” is hardly resolved. A few days after my visit, in early June, Dressback met with Freeman to receive an official performance review for the 2023-24 academic year, a copy of which she shared with me. It was the first official yearly evaluation she had been given in her career in the district despite a stipulation in her contract that this occur annually, she said. It is searing. It finds that her “job performance is unsatisfactory.” The report was sent to the state Department of Education, per Alabama code requiring that personnel records and “investigative information” of employees placed on administrative leave for cause be reviewed by the department. 

Most damning are six bullet points of claims. One alludes to Robinson’s employment and the timesheet matter. The most explosive is cast as “failure to demonstrate moderation, restraint, and civility in dealing with employees” and includes salacious assertions, including “public displays of affection and of photographs which would not, for example, be tolerated even among high school students” — presumably a reference to the photos shown to Smith, the custodian. It includes a charge Dressback had never heard before: a claim of “remote activation by your husband of a sexual toy on your person while you were in a school meeting.”  

Related: Investigating why a high-performing superintendent left his job 

Dressback was floored by the charges, and countered each in her rebuttal, which she asked to have filed with the state Department of Education in response to Freeman’s report. Regarding the sex toy claim, Dressback wrote that it is “false. I have never done that, and I would never do that.” The very idea of “remote activation” of a sex toy by her husband was absurd, she said. “I wouldn’t think that I would need to remind you that my ex-husband and I are divorced, that I have recently come out as gay, and that I am now in a committed relationship with a woman,” she wrote. 

Such a thing never happened then, or in any school year, her rebuttal continued. She wrote that she “cannot imagine why you would credit this slanderous and irresponsible allegation” and include it in her personnel record, “other than to retaliate against me” for the EEOC filing.  

Her lawyer said in an email that the performance review “is further retaliation and an attempt to create further pretexts for the adverse employment actions the Board has already taken against her.”  

On Aug. 15, after the state Department of Education had reviewed the evaluation submitted by Freeman, the agency stated in a letter addressed to Dressback, cc’ing Freeman, that it had “examined information regarding an investigation in the Vestavia Hills City School System” and “decided to not take action against your Alabama Educator Certificate.” The same day, Freeman said in a letter to Dressback that she would “no longer be on administrative leave and may return to work” at the alternative school. 

It has been baffling and infuriating to some in the community as to how such charges surfaced so soon after Dressback was given a three-year contract extension last year.  The mystery that remains is why some people — people who were eager for her to continue leading the elementary school — now want her gone. The battle has been drawn up and is now readying to be fought. Dressback told me that beyond feeling driven to “defend my name and my integrity,” she wants to speak up for others who come after — or who are now silent.  

Of course, Dressback had hoped this could all be avoided. “I tried to just be the good employee,” she told me. “I thought if I just do what they ask me to do, this is gonna get wrapped up and I’ll go back to work” at Cahaba Heights.  

Notably, she still feels loyalty, even love, for Vestavia Hills and its school system.  

“Maybe I shouldn’t feel the allegiance I feel,” she said when we spoke over Zoom several weeks ago. “But I can’t just turn it off. It’s not like a water faucet. You know, it’s my home. It’s where I grew up and it’s where I chose to plant my career. As betrayed as I have felt, I just can’t turn my back on the system.” Rather, she wants to nudge it forward. 

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct name of Millersville University.

This story about Vestavia Hills was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.  

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Apparently, there is not enough joy to go around, and some “joyful warriors” are upset about, among other things, what they see as their nickname being ripped off.

Joy has become a theme of the Democratic ticket — Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed herself and running mate Tim Walz “joyful warriors” against their Republican opponents. The conservative parent group Moms for Liberty made a point of attacking the Democrats’ use of the phrase during its four-day annual summit over Labor Day weekend in Washington D.C.

“I want to remind people who are the OG Joyful Warriors,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich said Friday evening, ahead of an appearance by Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.    

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

As a whole, the summit sent dual messages. One cast Moms for Liberty and the broader Republican party as working to appeal across party lines. The other unleashed strikingly vitriolic language about claimed dangers of the Harris-Walz ticket — especially to parents. Leaders made one particular issue — transgender students — the focus of their messaging. Staple concerns of past years, including social emotional learning, DEI initiatives and “inappropriate” books, took a backseat. There was little talk of academics or learning.

Instead, co-founder Tiffany Justice painted schools as predatory, seeking to infect children with ideas about gender that lead them to declare they are nonbinary. And Walz, whose policies as governor of Minnesota are considered LGBTQ+-friendly, was a special target of attack. 

“Tim Walz is, I mean, what a radical, radical bad guy,” Justice said in an interview with The Hechinger Report, calling him “anti-parent” and repeating inaccurate portrayals of  Minnesota law as allowing minor children to come to the state for gender-affirming care without their parents’ consent and saying that children can be removed from their parents’ custody if they disagree with their kids’ desire for gender-affirming care. (A Minnesota law gives courts there the ability to intervene temporarily in a custody dispute across state lines when a child cannot obtain care.)

She also raised concerns about what she called “a social contagion that has taken over in our country. It’s called rapid onset gender dysphoria,” Justice said, referring to a disorder described in a paper published last year in the scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior that has since been retracted. 

“There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Please quote me on that,” she continued. “There are children who are experiencing mental distress and they need kindness and compassion and help to feel comfortable in their own bodies, because no child is born in the wrong body.”

Aside from a playful interlude featuring covers of John Mellencamp and Lynyrd Skynyrd that brought attendees clad in sequined MAGA wear and American Flag-inspired fashion to their feet, the event felt less organized — and less joyful — than past years.

Related: Title IX regulations on sex discrimination can be Trump-era or Biden-era, depending on your state or school

Instead, the prevailing tone was one of aggression. The us-versus-them framing is not new. At the first Moms for Liberty summit, in Tampa in 2022, attendees were invited to a well-choreographed unveiling of the alleged dangers facing children in public school — and an urgent call to get involved. The second, in Philadelphia, schooled them in real-time opposition as the extent of protests seemed to surprise attendees doing what they saw as the noble work of moms. This year, many got that this was less about gathering information or learning than rallying around your team. On the cusp of a big election, what could they do to help? How could they recruit more people to defeat a Democratic ticket cast as lethal to their children’s well-being — even as they look to be having lots of fun and supporting lunchbox issues like school meals?

“It’s crazy what’s going on,” said one Maryland mom, a first-time attendee who said she has become more active “because I can” since her youngest graduated from high school. “Moms with 5- and 6-year-olds don’t have time to fight.”

The summit gathered some 600 moms, grandmothers — and a fair number of dads, for whom an in-person appearance from Trump was perhaps the biggest draw. Even though the former president was on stage for nearly an hour, he said little about education, instead repeatedly veering to the subject of immigration regardless of what question Justice asked him. In some of his few comments on schools, he charged without evidence that public schools are aggressively involved in providing gender-affirming care.  

“The transgender thing is incredible,” Trump said. “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

Some of Trump’s remarks on immigration, meanwhile, focused on the dangers of newcomers to public education. At one point, he alleged that new arrivals bring gangs and disease into schools, and are welcomed warmly while current students are shut out. “They don’t even speak English,” he said. “It’s crazy. And we have our people that aren’t going into a classroom. We have students that were there last year that aren’t allowed into the school.”

Trump also spent time reflecting on the difficulties of being a candidate. When Justice asked Trump for his advice to busy moms considering a run for school board — some of the core work of Moms for Liberty is to encourage members to seek office — his answer was, “Don’t do it.” 

While Justice noted to the crowd that Moms for Liberty endorses candidates only in school board races, she personally endorsed Trump as she concluded her interview. 

Related: Moms For Liberty flexes its muscles — and faces pushback

Despite the clearly partisan tone of the summit, there was an effort to cross ideological lines to expand support for the Republican ticket ahead of the election. A Friday morning keynote panel featured four women whom Justice said had “chosen to walk away from the Democratic party”: Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii; Texas state Rep. Shawn Thierry, who left the Democratic party in late August; athletic clothing maker and former gymnast Jennifer Sey who has written about how she regrets voting for President Joe Biden; and New York City parent advocate and former Democratic congressional candidate Maud Maron.

Gabbard, who was recently named to be part of Trump’s transition team, said the Democratic Party “is no longer the big tent party that welcomes people from all walks of life.” She coached attendees on how to approach a person in their circle “who doesn’t quite see the truth,” and urged them to do so. “Scroll through your phone. Think about the people who may need a little bit of a nudge,” she said.

“Who’s gonna unite our country?” Gabbard called to the crowd. “We are!”  

This year’s summit lacked the hundreds of protesters who were a constant presence at the 2023 event in Philadelphia, spurring a large and visible security detail and barricades at the hotel entrance. By contrast, the streets outside of the JW Marriott in Washington, less than half a mile from the White House, were quiet.

Yet many of the same groups that had gathered to protest Moms for Liberty last year  staged a separate counter-event, “Celebration of Reading,” on Saturday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington. Participants read aloud banned books and gave away nearly 1,000 of them to children and families who arrived in strollers and on foot.

At the same time, several dozen conservative groups, including Moms for Liberty, organized what they said would be the first annual “March for Kids” to “bring awareness to the decline of our educational system and the erosion of parental rights.” Originally planned for the National Mall, it was moved at the last minute indoors to the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall; organizers cited safety concerns. As it got underway, some 300 people populated a hall with a capacity of 3,702.

Meg Simons, digital strategy manager at the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, said that the strong showing of protestors in Philadelphia so motivated many older members of her 40-year-old organization that they started Grandparents For Truth to counter Moms for Liberty.

Marge Baker, a founding member of the grandparent group, said it bothered her to see Moms for Liberty “out there organizing and trying to claim this mantle of freedom when what they want is the freedom to decide what all parents and children can read.” Baker spoke moments before her husband, Robert Banks, was to read aloud “The Lorax,” which has been banned in some places for promoting an environmentalist agenda and negatively depicting the logging industry.

Heidi Ross, another grandmother, traveled from Buckeye, Arizona, to help out at the event. “This is my world,” she said, holding up a screen shot of her 2-year-old granddaughter, Lili. Ross said she has been upset by the rise of school vouchers in her state and the attacks on books. “Children should know about everybody, every family,” she said, adding that, “there are different families, even in my Republican neighborhood.”

During the Moms for Liberty summit, attendees chatted at booths staffed by representatives of organizations such as Lifewise Academy, which touts a Bible education program for public school students that can be offered during the school day. Other booths plus a strategy session run by lawyers with The Heritage Foundation and Institute for Free Speech offered guidance to parents for fighting the new Biden administration Title IX regulation, which extends protection against sex discrimination to students based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Moms for Liberty helped derail the regulation, at least for now, in 26 states and thousands of schools in other states, a list that is growing by the week.

Julie Womack, head of organizing for Red, Wine & Blue, a national progressive group that helps suburban women organize, hosted an online information event about the new Title IX rules, a panel with parents of trans kids, and is planning a “Troublemaker Training” on Oct. 16 to counter disinformation about transgender individuals. “Many people in real life have very little experience,” with transgender individuals, said Womack.  Even parents of transgender youth, she said, admit “they didn’t know how to handle it. Well, we are all learning. It is OK to learn. But it is not OK to exclude.”

Liz King, who leads the education program for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, one of the counter-event’s sponsors, said Moms for Liberty is boxing people out rather than being inclusive. As the group’s language escalates, she said, “they have resorted to the old canard of fear-mongering.”

This all comes at a critical time.“One of the questions right now is, ‘What does it mean to be a parent?’” said King. “What we see with this organization of Moms for Liberty is a betrayal of the responsibility of parents and an anti-liberty agenda.”

This story about Moms for Liberty was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Last spring, when the odds seemed far longer, Bob Cousineau, a social studies teacher at Pennridge High School, predicted that whatever happened in his embattled district would become a national “case study” one way or another. It would either create “the blueprint” for outside political interests to enact a complete takeover of local public schools, he said, or “the blueprint for how to stand up to it.”

For much of the past two years, Pennridge School District, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — one of Philadelphia’s suburban swing counties — has served as an experiment in how far conservatives can pull public schools right.

Until this past November, its nine school board members had all been elected as Republicans, including a five-member majority reportedly affiliated with the activist group Moms for Liberty. Policies introduced by the board and district administrators in recent years have been sweeping: Two separate groups focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues were shut down; LGBTQ+ “Pride” rainbows were banned alongside other “advocacy” symbols; curriculum was repeatedly changed or culled to remove purportedly partisan topics; and more than a dozen library books — most related to race, gender, or sexuality — were reportedly “shadow-banned” by officials unwilling to wait for a formal review. Anti-trans policies were passed, school staff were ordered not to use “terms related to LGBTQ,” and a full year of social studies was cut from graduation requirements to make room for supposedly more patriotic instruction.

All of this reached a boiling point last April, when Pennridge hired a brand-new consultancy firm called Vermilion Education. The company, according to its website, is intended to help school board members keep their districts “ideology-free,” but critics say it is meant to transform public school districts along the lines of the right-wing Hillsdale College. At the Moms for Liberty annual conference in July, Vermilion founder Jordan Adams said that districts like Pennridge, where conservatives had gained control of school boards, faced a “do or die kind of moment” to enact so many new changes, so swiftly, that their opponents wouldn’t be able to resist. “If we don’t make the most of this chance,” he said, “we’re not going to get another one.”

“It hit us like a ton of bricks,” said Laura Foster, a local mother who helped create the progressive advocacy group the Ridge Network to fight the right-wing dominance of Pennridge’s schools. “They systematically changed policies in the school…so if there’s racism happening, you can’t do anything about it; if there’s homophobia, you can’t do anything about it. Just these methodical, step-by-step plays.”

That’s how things seemed in Pennridge until November’s school board election, when all five open seats were won by Democrats — a stunning turnaround in a district with a more than 3:2 Republican advantage. A week later, another page in an emerging playbook for fighting back was more quietly revealed, when a group of Pennridge community members charged that the policies Pennridge had adopted weren’t just partisan, but violated civil rights law, in a federal complaint that could have implications far beyond Bucks County.

When the Pennridge board passed a last-minute motion to hire Vermilion Education last April, the company was virtually unheard of apart from a controversy that had just roiled Sarasota, Florida. There, another school board had unsuccessfully attempted to contract it to review curricula, teacher trainings, union contracts, and more.

But if Adams and Vermilion were unknown quantities, for many in Pennridge, what they seemed to represent was not.

Before officially launching Vermilion in March, Adams had worked for his alma mater, Hillsdale — a private Christian college in Michigan dedicated to “classical” education, hard-right political advocacy, and spreading its education model nationwide. Its “1776 Curriculum” for grades K-12 has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony. Hillsdale boasts a national network of affiliated charter schools, and one of its former professors helped revise South Dakota’s social studies standards along the lines of the 1776 Curriculum. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a slate of hard-right board members at the public New College of Florida, with the goal of transforming it into a “little Hillsdale” of the South.

Related: The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives

A Hillsdale employee until early 2023, Adams worked on its charter program and to promote the college’s 1776 Curriculum. He’d also been enlisted by Florida’s Department of Education to review math textbooks for “prohibited topics” like critical race theory, and by South Dakota to train teachers on the new social studies standards.

In Sarasota, after public outcry over Adams’s proposed contract with the district, two conservative board members broke rank and blocked it. The following week, after Pennridge hired Vermilion instead, Sarasota board chair Bridget Ziegler — a Moms for Liberty cofounder — lamented on Facebook that Vermilion’s inaugural “‘WOKE’ Audit” should have been with them. “We could have and should have led on this.”

In Pennridge, there were also anti-Vermilion protests. Nearly 2,000 residents signed on to a petition opposing the contract, while school board meetings filled with speakers expressing their outrage for hours on end. But until recently, none of it seemed to make a difference.

Laura Foster grew up in Pennridge and attended its schools, as have her three children. The area had always been fairly conservative. But in recent years, she said, the district had seemed to swing further to the right. Bucks County became an epicenter of ugly fights over COVID masking and rainbow flags. As of early 2022, it had the highest number of January 6 arrestees of any locality, according to local media. In 2021, a Bucks County venture capitalist and longtime Republican funder concerned about COVID closures donated half a million dollars to school board races around the state.

Also in 2021 came Pennridge’s first serious battles over diversity programs. That June, a local parent-teacher DEI group — formed to address student reports of racism and homophobia — installed a bulletin board display in Seylar Elementary School featuring collages representing Juneteenth, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival, and Pride.

When Seylar guidance counselor Missy Kunakorn walked out of her office that day and saw two moms stapling up the display, “I broke down and cried, because I thought, There we are. I can’t believe we’re at this turning point,” she said. “Then,” she adds, “it all came like a landslide.”

That month, then school board vice president Joan Cullen — who a year earlier had claimed on social media that systemic racism doesn’t exist — charged that the various DEI initiatives underway in the district were influenced by critical race theory, the academic concept just emerging as a target of conservative ire. (Cullen did not respond to a request for comment.) The bulletin board was removed, and by August, Kunakorn said, DEI had become “a bad word.” Meanwhile, local resident David Bedillion helped organize a parent group to protest DEI initiatives, and parents came as a bloc to school board meetings. Some charged that the existence of DEI programs cast the entire district as racist, or that highlighting student differences is racist in and of itself, and called to suspend district DEI programs.

At the start of the school year, the board voted to do just that. The district’s website was scrubbed of references to DEI, and a new, board-directed committee was created to review DEI initiatives. But it didn’t get far. The group spent months debating its mission, including hours of disagreement over the meaning of the word equity, and one of its open community meetings was derailed when a member of the public called a Black committee member “boy.”

That year, books by two Black women authors were removed from the ninth-grade English curriculum, and one unit of English instruction, “Dreams and Oppressions,” was changed to remove the word oppressions from its title, reframing the course to focus on personal obstacles rather than systemic discrimination. On Facebook, Bedillion’s group shared an email they had received from the superintendent, who, according to a screenshot shared on social media, wrote that the district was implementing the changes after reviewing the group’s “feedback.”

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

By November, when a slate of Republican school board candidates who’d campaigned against DEI was elected, the changes started to come hard and fast. The new DEI committee was disbanded in early 2022, as students continued to report racial hostility. According to the civil rights complaint, some Black students had grown so accustomed to hearing the N-word that they said they stopped responding unless the language was directed at them personally. Meanwhile, according to documents published by WHYY shortly after the election, school administrators were imposing new restrictions. One policy directed librarians and principals to remove all library books “referencing gender identity” from elementary student circulation; another directed staff to not “discuss or use terms related to LGBTQ” with elementary school students, to obtain parental permission before following students’ requests to be called by a different name or pronouns, and to inform parents of students who become pregnant.

Then there was the curriculum. At the new board’s first meeting in January 2022, members of its new majority attacked proposed AP World History textbooks for not focusing enough on the “meat and potatoes of history,” and complained that elementary social studies didn’t adequately “focus on the greatness of America.” Another new board member suggested, in a March 2022 email obtained by the Bucks County Beacon, that a high school journalism course should incorporate podcasts from right-wing celebrities like Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Senator Ted Cruz to replace existing material concerning climate change, LGBTQ+ issues, or racial justice.

As a means of making the world history course optional, the board majority proposed cutting social studies graduation requirements by a year, to make room for a new ninth-grade “American Studies” course focused on instilling patriotism and an understanding of the Constitution. What it would mean in practice, said teacher Bob Cousineau, was a 114-year gap in history instruction for the district’s students, since Pennridge eighth-grade history went up to the year 1800, and 10th-grade started at World War I.

Parents, teachers, and students united in public backlash. But in December 2022, the board majority voted it through anyway, and school staff began writing the new replacement course and working on “overlayling” the Hillsdale College curriculum with the current social studies curriculum.

But in the following months, board member Jordan Blomgren started growing suspicious that Pennridge teachers didn’t intend to actually make use of Hillsdale’s materials. As she would later argue in school board meetings, Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum was “supposed to be overlaid” with the district’s lesson plans, yet “there was never any evidence of that overlay” actually happening. She contacted the college to ask for advice, and met Jordan Adams, then in the process of parlaying his Hillsdale credentials into a new consultancy business — Vermilion Education — targeted at conservative school boards hoping to transform their school districts. (Blomgren did not respond to a request for comment.)

On April 25, the day before the Pennridge School Board was set to meet, Blomgren made a late addition to the meeting agenda. Tucked among 22 file attachments in a report from the finance committee was a draft contract to hire Vermilion Education to review and develop Pennridge curriculum. Half of the board had no idea the proposal was coming, as board member Ron Wurz reported in a local op-ed. He charged that the scope of the Vermilion contract would allow “an unqualified firm with limited experience the ability to rewrite all of our curriculum.”

District administrators were taken aback too. In an April 25 email obtained weeks later by Jenny Stephens of the Bucks County Beacon, then superintendent David Bolton warned the board that the last-minute proposal would be perceived as the board forcing Hillsdale materials on the district and disrupting the work underway to complete the new ninth-grade course.

But the following day, the board’s majority approved the contract anyway, with no apparent limit on Adams’s billable hours (at $125 per hour) or expenses. In the following weeks, Cousineau recounted, the teachers drafting the American Studies course were told to halt their work, high school English teachers were told to stop writing a new humanities course, and a middle school reading curriculum set to receive final approval was pulled. The district’s four curriculum advisers were also reportedly informed that their jobs were being eliminated, though the board voted to table a motion to do so in June after public backlash. And in early June, Superintendent Bolton announced he was going on health leave; later that month, he announced his retirement.

“What they’re doing is removing everything in their way,” Cousineau said in June. Elected board members weren’t supposed to have a larger role in designing curriculum than teachers, he continued, but here they’d taken over the process. “They’re going in through a backdoor that’s supposed to be locked,” he said. “And when they get in, they’re going to rearrange everything the way they want.”

Related: School clubs for gay students move underground after Kentucky’s anti-LGBTQ+ law goes into effect

Weeks after the contract was approved, at a May 10 school board meeting, the board majority repeatedly tried to limit public discussion of Vermilion, threatening speakers with removal and going into an abrupt recess when Vermilion was brought up anyway. In early June, hundreds of Pennridge community members waited 45 minutes for an online meeting set to feature an update about Vermilion, before board members abruptly terminated the Zoom. Board politics were so scrambled by the controversy that even former president Joan Cullen — so staunchly right-wing that she’d attended Donald Trump’s DC rally on January 6 — became one of Vermilion’s fiercest critics, and board member Ron Wurz changed his political affiliation to Democratic.

The public sentiment at meetings was so uniformly negative that, several days prior to a June 20 session on curriculum, where Adams would finally be present, board member Ricki Chaikin posted an appeal on Facebook for local conservatives to attend and defend the Vermilion contract. “This should be something that unites the entire community,” Chaikin wrote, “as this is what everyone has claimed they want.” Instead, the meeting that night lasted more than six hours, as members of the public spoke against the contract until about 1 a.m. (Chaikin did not respond to a request for comment.)

After Adams Zoomed into the meeting — recommending books to remove from the curriculum, dramatic changes in history instruction, and a suggestion that a sixth-grade course be adapted to reflect an emphasis on “Lasting Ideas in World History,” using rhetoric that, in Hillsdale charter school curricula, has been used to describe teaching about the Bible and “the nature of God and humanity” — the public response was withering. One elementary school principal declared it was as if Adams had “asked Alexa to ‘Show him curriculum.’” Others pointed out that Adams, whose only classroom experience amounted to brief stints at a Hillsdale-affiliated charter and a private Catholic school, was unqualified to develop curriculum under Pennsylvania code. When Cullen noted that Adams had already been paid for 60 hours of work, the audience gasped.

Adams, who steadfastly rejects that Vermilion has any formal or informal connection to Hillsdale, denied critics’ charges that Vermilion’s work had its own political bias. “I have no interest whatsoever in turning students into Republican Party voters; that would be entirely beyond the purpose of a public school education, not to mention inappropriate,” he said via email. The “lasting ideas” ideas language used by Hillsdale to describe theological concepts Adams said he’d encountered through a different curriculum, unaffiliated with Hillsdale. “As for the claim that Vermilion intends ‘to minimize teaching about the history of US race relations and LGBTQ issues,’” he said, “that is a slanderous and insulting accusation of bigotry that has been baselessly leveled against me.” In response to criticism that he was unqualified to write curriculum under state law, he added, “Like Pennsylvania educators and curriculum providers, Vermilion Education was limited to making curriculum recommendations to district administrators and board members, who then had the legal authority to decide what to use, what to edit, and what to omit in making the district’s curriculum.”

At the June meeting, another concern was voiced: that Pennridge teachers were quitting in droves. Some noted that nearly a third of Pennridge High School’s science teachers had recently resigned. By early July, the local teachers union reported that at least 35 of its members had left. The same month, an elementary school principal announced her resignation in an email, noting that while she’d once hoped to finish her career in Pennridge, “Upon reflection, I found that I needed to move in a direction that most aligned [with] my values.” (Pennridge leaders declined to respond to questions for this article.)

“Right now, we’re on our third principal of the year, our second temporary principal,” elaborated local parent Dan Shapiro in an interview this fall. “We lost eight of 18 classroom teachers in one summer.” And among those “who have publicly said why they left,” he added, “many have cited the actions of the board.”

Despite the overwhelming public opposition, the day after the June meeting, when Wurz moved to terminate the contract, calling Adams’s work an “embarrassment,” the motion failed along predictable 5-4 lines, as similar motions would throughout the coming months.

By late August, a week before school began, the scope of the changes being recommended by Vermilion started to become clear. A middle school reading program would be altered because the books, one board majority member said, were too “doom and gloom.” A unit covering discrimination in a 12th-grade course called “Social Issues in Today’s World” was among a list of lesson plans that Adams flagged as “potentially prejudiced, biased, inappropriate, or partisan.” Language throughout the proposed curricula specified that Hillsdale materials would now be “required” instructional resources for teachers.

Worse yet, teachers who spoke at the August 21 curriculum meeting said they were given almost no chance to review the changes before the school board met to discuss and vote on them. In the limited time they did have, Cousineau and several colleagues identified dozens of problems with the new curriculum, from historically misleading statements to the continued issue of the century-plus gap in history education. Other teachers stood up to say they were in “panic” to start a new school year with a curriculum they hadn’t even had a chance to read.

Out of all those who spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting, only one supported Vermilion: a right-wing candidate for the upcoming school board elections who had reportedly called for hanging board members of a neighboring school district after they voted to close schools during COVID and who said in the meeting that he was most concerned that the controversy around Vermilion was harming Adams’s business.

More common was the sentiment of Kevin E. Leven, of the Bucks County Anti-Racism Coalition, who, at the school board meeting the following week, cited the curriculum’s distortion of civil rights history in declaring, “The only thing Vermilion is preparing the students of this community for is the arduous, painful, and necessary unlearning of the teachings espoused by Hillsdale later in their careers.”

But despite the overwhelming opposition, by the end of that August 28 meeting, on the evening of the first day of school, the board approved Adams’s changes on a 5-4 vote.

Local community members responded with frustration and despair. Speaking at the meeting, Kevin Foster, a parent and Democratic political strategist, charged that the board had “sold off” the district to advance a national conservative agenda. “To what end is Pennridge going to be used in marketing materials to advertise Hillsdale to the rest of the country?” he asked.

Meanwhile, Laura Foster (no relation) said she began to hear rumors that Adams was looking at other courses throughout the Pennridge curriculum, far beyond what he’d originally been hired to review, suggesting still more changes to come. (In response to questions, Adams said, “I only reviewed courses as requested by board members.”)

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“I honestly believe our district is probably the worst in the country right now that’s been impacted by Hillsdale,” said Laura Foster. “No one even knows what to do about this mess, because they’re just wholly taking control of a public education system.”

Pennridge father Dan Shapiro said he was preparing to tell his kids, “You guys might have to go to community college for a couple years to change your record, to give yourself a fresh start, so that colleges understand you’ve been educated in a way other than this insanity.”

But they didn’t stop at despair. In June, Laura Foster and a handful of other parents had founded the Ridge Network as a means of fighting the board majority. In July, they hosted a “book unbanning” party after Ridge Network cofounder Jane Cramer bought cartons of books the district was throwing away. They led a letter-writing campaign requesting Pennsylvania government officials investigate “school board overreach in Pennridge.” They wrote and distributed an opt-out form for parents to demand their children not be exposed to any curriculum or resources from Vermilion, Hillsdale, PragerU, the Bill of Rights Institute, or other right-wing groups making inroads in public school curriculum. And in perhaps the biggest counteroffensive, some local families began working with Pennsylvania legal groups to prepare a federal complaint against the district, alleging it had created a hostile environment that discriminated against students of color and LGBTQ+ students and staff.

Meanwhile, in the months leading up to the election, Ridge Network members rented billboards calling for school board leadership change, as other community members conducted a relentless door-knocking campaign, all making a bipartisan appeal that the board’s dysfunction was hurting kids regardless of their parents’ political beliefs.

On November 7, a verdict came. All five candidates who had run on a platform of firing Vermilion and restoring “local control” to the district won, giving Pennridge a Democratic-majority school board “for the first time in recent memory.” (One of the winning candidates was Foster’s sister, Leah Foster Rash.) It was a striking upset, but also part of a broader pattern: Numerous right-wing school board candidates around the country — amounting to around 70 percent of candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty or the 1776 Project, according to one estimate — were defeated in what education writer Jennifer Berkshire has called the “backlash to the backlash.”

And at the end of the month came news that one of the outgoing board’s final acts would be terminating Vermilion’s contract — either, critics charged, to create the impression that Adams had accomplished his task, or merely to deprive the new board of the chance to fire him. In an emailed statement, Adams said, “Both parties confirmed that all outstanding work requests from the board had been completed and agreed to conclude the contract.” But on December 4, when Pennridge’s new board was sworn in, its newly-elected president, Ron Wurz, declared that the incoming board would focus on undoing Vermilion’s influence and reconsidering many of the other policies the old board had passed.

In the days after the election, said Cousineau, it felt like teachers had come “back from the dead.” Not only due to the prospect of a return to normalcy after years of stressful school politics, he said, but also because they felt the broader Pennridge community had stood up for them. “The teachers spoke passionately at board meetings: ‘This is wrong,’ ‘We’re not happy,’ ‘Please don’t do this.’ And the board still did it,” Cousineau said. “But the community held them accountable.”

“I’ve been saying we’re going to create the model of how to dismantle public education successfully, or we’re going to create a model where you can resist people who are trying to dismantle public education for political reasons,” he added. “And the latter happened.” Already, he said, people from other states were reaching out to Pennridge’s community groups like the Ridge Network and the teachers union to ask for advice on similar fights in their own communities. And Cousineau said he was planning on working with union leaders in neighboring Central Bucks School District to educate local, state, and national teachers’ unions on how to resist extremist school boards.

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But the opportunities to fight back aren’t limited to school board elections, said Foster. A week after the election, on November 15, the Advocacy for Racial and Civil (ARC) Justice Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania law school and the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania filed their complaint on behalf of Pennridge students and educators with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the Department of Justice. (The Pennridge School District declined to comment on the complaint.)

It wasn’t the first time an OCR complaint was filed against Bucks County schools. Last year, Central Bucks was the subject of an OCR complaint for allegedly creating a hostile learning environment for LGBTQ+ students. But a new “dear colleague letter,” released in August by the Biden administration’s OCR, potentially opens the door wider for addressing Pennridge community complaints, by noting how school programming around race, including schools’ “race-related curricula,” can create a hostile environment that violates students’ civil rights.

The letter hypothesizes, for example, that a history teacher who teaches students that the Holocaust didn’t happen and that Nazis only wanted “to preserve a unified and culturally cohesive German society” relies on such a hostile distortion of historical fact that Jewish students might be deterred from attending class. On such grounds, the letter says, OCR could open an investigation.

It’s a short logical step from that example to attempts today, in Pennridge and around the country, to distort or minimize the reality of US slavery, or the genocide of Native Americans, or the various forms of oppression that continued for centuries after both.

In the Pennridge OCR complaint, the lawyers alleged that the district had created “a hostile environment rife with race- and sex-based harassment” in a number of ways, including by fostering a climate that tolerated racial slurs and anti-LGBTQ+ harassment; subjecting Black students to disproportionate discipline (including adult criminal citations for Black students who got in fights after being called racial slurs); and by instituting an anti-trans bathroom policy that forced a trans teacher to use a bathroom on the other side of the school building. Lawyers alleged the climate and policies had driven at least one Black family to consider moving, an LGBTQ+ student to opt for online-only instruction, and the trans teacher to resign.

But the complaint also pinpoints what Pennridge schools teach — and what they prevent students from learning — as a violation of civil rights. The curriculum changes, removal of DEI resources, and other steps to restrict student education on discrimination and its history “created an environment where race- and sex-based harassment can flourish,” the filing says.

“Students learn from the ability to understand the history of oppression. It’s one of the ways we ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself,” said Cara McClellan, director of the Penn Law School’s ARC Justice Clinic, and lead attorney on the OCR complaint. “Having access to a curriculum that honestly talks about history is one way we buffer against a hostile environment” or marginalized students “internalizing discrimination.” At Pennridge, McClellan continued, the school board undermined some of the very tools — like diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and access to diverse learning materials — that school districts must use in their legal duty to address a hostile environment.

While the complaint seeks specific changes in Pennridge, like the creation of a district-wide DEI position, it could also compel the federal government to weigh in on whether the far-right’s school board strategy — stifling student and staff expression, culling diverse books, banning DEI programing, and instituting revisionist history — is something that inherently violates civil rights law.

“I don’t believe there’s any precedent for that with OCR,” said Foster. “It’s always been, ‘What happened to your kid? What did the school do?’ Not that the whole school is what happened to your kid.”

If the complaint is successful, it could establish a countermodel in other school districts and states where accurate teaching of history or the inclusion of diverse voices has been replaced by the 1776 Curriculum or videos from PragerU.

It could take a few months at least before the federal government determines whether to open an investigation — and receiving a determination will take far longer. But ultimately, both Foster and McClellan hope the outcome is one that makes Pennridge a very different sort of model.

“This is a playbook for what you have to do,” Foster said, to unwind the damage the culture wars of the past few years have wrought on education. “There’s a lot of work to undo. But this is bigger than winning a school board.”

This story about Vermilion Education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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