A Florida teacher has been accused of indoctrination for showing her class Disney’s Strange World, due to the fact that it has a gay character in it.
We don’t cover every movie story that crossed our eyes on this site, but this is the kind of tale that it feels wrong to turn away from.
Get past the headlines about its box office returns (or lack of them), and last year’s Disney animated movie Strange World is a charming film, that’s well worth seeking out. It turns out though that it’s ruffled a few people’s feathers because one of the characters in it is gay. And some people – checks calendar, checks century – don’t like that.
Jenna Barbee is a teacher in Florida, at the Winding Waters K-8 school in Hernando County. She showed her class Strange World, wanting to give them what in her words she called a ‘brain break’. And now she’s facing an investigation from Florida’s Department of Education for it.
Never mind that every parent had signed a permission slip for their children to be allowed to be shown PG-rated movies, which Strange World is. It turns out that one of the children in her class is the child of a member of the school board, and when said member of the school board found out what film their offspring had watched, things were escalated.
“None of my students cared or batted an eye. They didn’t even know this was a big deal until the board member and the state made it a big deal”, Barbee explained in this TikTok video she released.
The school board member in question, Shannon Rodriguez, defended her actions, with CNN reporting her saying that “as a leader in this community, I’m not going to stand by and allow this minority to infiltrate our schools … God did put me here”.
Good grief.
You can read her comments at the CNN piece here. You can see Barbee’s TikTok video here. You can roll your eyes and express dismay at the state of the world in the comments below.
For the purposes of avoiding any doubt, my support is firmly with Jenna Barbee.
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
