A Florida fifth grade teacher who’s under state investigation for showing a Disney animated feature to her students is speaking out.
Jenna Barbee said got into “trouble” for screening “Strange World” — a 2022 Walt Disney Studios animated feature featuring a gay character — to some of her students, while their peers finished taking some standardized tests.
Barbee said she wanted to give her students a “brain break” after an intense morning of testing. However, she was “turned in” by one of the students: the daughter of a school board member.
“That school board member is currently on a rampage to get rid of every form of representation out of our schools,” Barbee said in a video shared on social media over the weekend. The person then “called the department of education on me for indoctrination before ever coming into our school to talk with me or admin about the situation.”
Speaking on CNN on Monday night, Barbee said she wasn’t aware the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law had been recently expanded to all grades.
In May 2022, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial bill prohibiting classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation from grades K-3. Late last month, the Florida Board of Education approved an extension of the ban for students of all grades.
“I just found out today that they increased it to my level,” Barbee told CNN. “I had no idea whatsoever that this was such a big deal.”
A letter from the Florida Department for Education says Barbee is being investigated over “allegations that [she] engaged in inappropriate conduct.”
It also directs her to send the department any “evidentiary witnesses or documents pertinent to the case.”
In her 6-minute video shared on TikTok, Barbee said the students “didn’t even know this was a big deal until the board member and the state made it a big deal.”
She also noted teachers’ method of approval of screenings shown to students has always been to get a “signed parent permission slip for PG movies.”
“I had that … with no objection to specific content,” she added.
The parent school board member, identified by CNN as Shannon Rodriguez, said Barbee is “playing the victim.”
At a school board meeting last week, Rodriguez said allowing movies such as “Strange World” gives teachers permission to open a door “for conversations that have no place in our classrooms.”