Florida Teacher Under Investigation For Showing Disney Movie ‘Strange World’ That Includes A Gay Character
16.05.2023 - 02:11
/ deadline.com
A school teacher is under investigation by the Florida Department of Education after she showed the class the Disney animated movie Strange World.
Jenna Barbee, a teacher at Hernando County’s Winding Waters K-8 school, went viral on TikTok sharing her story on the social media platform.
“I am the teacher that’s under investigation with the Florida Department of Education for indoctrination for showing a Disney movie,” she said in the over six-minute video.
Barbee, a first-year teacher, explained in the video that she wanted to give the students a “brain break” after a morning of standardized testing. The students were split in the afternoon between Barbee’s class and another teacher’s class into those that had finished their test and those that had not. Barbees said that all parents had signed permission slips allowing them to show PG-rated movies “with no objections to specific content.”
“The reason I was turned in is because one of the split students was a school board member’s daughter,” she explained. “That school board member is currently on a rampage to get rid of every form of representation out of our schools.”
Barbee says she ended up meeting with the school board member and says she “understood her perspective, that she really doesn’t want this shown at her house,” adding, “I never saw that perspective before, so I didn’t think it was a big deal but seeing how upset she was, I told her, ‘I understand my lesson.'”
The school board member had already reported Barbee and there was not much she could do at that point. Barbee said she chose Strange World as it relates to the curriculum about “Earth science and ecosystems and how they interact — plants, humans, animals…”
“My thought process was, what a better way