After A Challenging School Year, LGBTQ+ Educators Share Their Experiences

For LGBTQ+ educators and students, the past school year was marked by protests, controversial gender notification policies, flag bans, and book restrictions, testing teachers’ ability to create a safe space to learn for students who are still struggling academically and psychologically in the wake of the pandemic.

There’s also been some shows of support: In recent years, the Los Angeles Unified School District board has passed more than a half-dozen resolutions in support of LGBTQ+ students that recognized Pride Month, added non-discrimination training for staff and sought partnerships with nonprofits focused on queer youth.

We wanted to understand how LGBTQ+ educators have faced these challenges, so we checked in with teachers in districts big and small about the struggles and joys inside and outside of the classroom.

Skye Tooley is an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles.

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‘I'd rather live my full self than try to hide’

One of the first books Skye Tooley reads in their fifth grade class is They Call Me Mix, a picture book that helps them explain what it means to be nonbinary.

The book is among about a thousand titles Tooley — Mx. T to their students — has added to their Los Angeles classroom library over a decade of teaching. LAist is not naming Tooley’s school because they have faced threats to their safety.

The stories on the shelves feature refugee families, African mythology, and teens navigating life between multiple cultures in Southern California.

Students at this age start to understand their role as individuals connected to the wider world, see other perspectives more clearly, and develop more empathy.

“Something that sticks with us beyond the classroom, beyond school, is loving reading,” Tooley said. “It opens them up to worlds that they may not have experienced before, or ideas that they haven't thought about before.”

Tooley said their approach to teaching changed as they realized the forces that have shaped their own education. “As adults we’re having to constantly reevaluate how we're showing up for ourselves in community,” Tooley said. “Same thing happens here in the classroom.”

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"I come from a love of reading," Tooley said. "I really want [students] to walk away with that love, even if it's just one or two stories."

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Tooley collaborates with educators throughout the state to create more inclusive lessons and curriculum, but sharing that work online, in combination with their trans identity, has made Tooley a target.

“It's not, you know, all sunshine rainbows type thing going on being a queer educator in California or anywhere in America,” Tooley said.

Tooley said online harassment has included death threats after their social media posts were highlighted in conservative media and by anti-LGBTQ+ social media accounts.

“I'm not going to go private,” Tooley said. “I'm not going to hide it because people need to know what's going on.”

Tooley now blocks specific keywords in comments and messages and is public about taking breaks to care for their mental health.

“I'd rather live my full self than try to hide because of death threats,” Tooley said. “I kind of leaned into that more, and leaned into my community and leaned into joy versus leaning into being scared.”

Research shows that educators who feel more safe are more effective teachers and students are negatively impacted when teachers experience discrimination.

Tooley is part of a task force within the teachers union to develop new ways to support queer students and educators and advocate for their needs during upcoming contract negotiations.

“To not address [harassment] allows it to continue to live and exist in our schools and hide in small ways,” Tooley said.

Several of the educators LAist talked to, including Tooley, say they looked to their local teachers union for support in navigating district policies when faced with online harassment.

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This bilingual picture book was written by a Northern California kindergarten teacher and explains what it means to be nonbinary.

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‘You want to defend your family, you want to defend your community’

Kelly and Iris Mendoza teach at South Central’s Frida Kahlo Continuation High. Students who have fallen behind often enroll in continuation schools to earn enough credits to get back on track to graduate.

“Not only are we two queer married women of color, but our classrooms are literally right next door to each other,” Iris said.

They infuse their classes in history, English, ethnic, studies, theater and art with the perspectives they didn’t explore until college.

Iris Mendoza grew up in Escondido in the ’90s and remembered the conversation around immigration at school was often divisive.

“You want to defend your family, you want to defend your community,” Iris said. “However, you're not given the tools to be able to explain why your family had to immigrate. Why did they have to leave?”

It wasn’t until she took a community college ethnic studies course that she started to understand the complex forces that often push families to immigrate to the U.S.

“Working with high school students and trying to ensure that they have that history earlier rather than waiting until college to start to see themselves reflected in the curriculum,” Iris said. “That's what brought me to teaching.”

Kelly Mendoza started out as a substitute teacher. She’d scan new schools for posters of LGBTQ+ people or books — cues that helped her decide how much of her identity to share in an unfamiliar space.

“Now that I have my own classroom, I'm just like, we're going to put up some posters, we're going to put up some flags,” Kelly said. “I want it to be that welcoming space, for my students and for other people from the community as well.”

The Mendozas said they initially questioned why they had to explain their relationship, but their perspective shifted once they started working in schools.

“We both understand if we're asking our students to think about their families, think about their identities, think about their communities that we have to be willing to talk about ourselves,” Iris said.

The Mendozas said local school leadership play a key role in ensuring the impact of these resolutions reaches students and educators.

“If you don't have good leaders then it becomes even more challenging to do an already challenging job,” Iris said.

‘An opportunity to make a bigger difference’

A series of contentious school board meetings led to the start of the 2024-25 school year in the Chino Valley Unified School District.

The board voted in June to limit the flags that can be displayed in classrooms, notably banning Pride flags. In July, the board passed a policy requiring schools to notify families of students who ask to identify as a gender other than the one on their birth certificate.

“It led to the uncertainty and just [a] feeling of uneasiness going into the school year,” said high school life sciences teacher Steven Frazer.

Steven Frazer a science teacher in Chino.

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Zaydee Sanchez

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Frazer holds a brochure that amplifies a safe space for LGBTQ+ people.

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Zaydee Sanchez

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The typically quiet summer board meeting drew hundreds of community members and outside agitators. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was forcibly removed from the meeting after speaking against the parental notification policy.

Frazer rallied fellow members of the local teachers union to attend the meeting and stood quietly in support while they addressed the board during public comment.

He said it was unclear how educators were expected to enforce the new rules.

Three weeks after the first day of school, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit challenging the gender disclosure policy. In March, the board voted to revamp the policy to require schools to notify parents if a student requests any change to their school record, rather than just a change related to their gender.

A California lawmaker introduced a bill in late May that would ban school policies that require educators to disclose a student’s gender identity to their family.

Some Chino Valley educators say the LGBTQ+ related policies have drawn board attention away from everyday issues like teacher pay and the needs of special education students.

At the Associated Chino Teachers office, pictures of faculty decorate the walls.

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The challenging year pushed Frazer to run for the Associated Chino Teachers presidency. His first term starts in July.

“This is an opportunity to make a bigger difference and support our students that are most vulnerable,” Frazer said.

More than half of LGBTQ+ teens report experiencing poor mental health and 1 in 5 saying they had attempted suicide in the last year, according to surveys from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Frazer, who most recently taught anatomy and biology, said he’ll miss the students’ humor and memes, but maybe not the smell of the annual mink dissection.

“The notes that say that when they look back, they remember my class being a place where they felt they could be comfortable means the most,” Frazer said.

‘Disrupting the K-12 education system’

E. approaches every conflict at her L.A. County charter school with a series of questions.

What was the root of that behavior and where is it coming from? And what does the educator or students involved need to make it right?

Inquiry is central to her work as a restorative justice coordinator.

E. requested that we not use her full name because she is not public with her sexuality at work and believes it may impact her interactions with students and their families.

One of E.’s goals is to help students, parents, and faculty solve interpersonal problems in a way that doesn’t remove kids from class. Restorative justice in education, which is an alternative to the traditional discipline styles of suspension and expulsion, has been shown to lower harmful behavior and absenteeism.

“I enjoy disrupting the K-12 education system, doing something so different than what we’ve known it to be,” E. said. “I enjoy chisme [gossip], so this is a great way to understand gossip. I often tell the kids and the parents, this is like a novella for me.”

Sometimes, the issues are more serious than gossip. In one case recently, students called a teacher (who is gay) homophobic and derogatory words throughout the day. As E. investigated what happened, she gave the teacher reassurance that she knew this was wrong.

“They also don't know about me, so I think sometimes they wonder where I stand on this issue,” E. said. “But it has been hard, and I’ve thought of like, would it make a difference if I do come out? Would that actually set a precedent or would that just make me a target as well?”

In E.’s school, she says gay educators feel like they need to be loud to get support. She’s seen more teachers share that they’re LGBTQ+, but it’s been coupled with more incidents of sexual harassment, specifically around homophobic terms.

Across the U.S., school hate crimes targeting LGBTQ+ people have more than doubled between 2015-2019 and 2021-2022, and the increase is higher in states that have restrictive gender and sexuality laws in education.

E. volunteers at an advocacy organization that aims to make K-12 schools more inclusive of LGBTQ+ youth, GLSEN L.A. She helps schools across the U.S. find new ways to support LGBTQ+ students.

E. said she worked with a private Maryland school to create policies on pronoun usage. And in L.A., she’s been providing resources to other schools that have seen an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ slurs.

At GLSEN L.A., she’s surrounded by people working toward better outcomes for LGBTQ+ students.

“Any work you do to disrupt something, you may not always have a group,” E. said. “But when you can put yourself in a space where you’re nurtured, you feel like you belong.”

‘Mistrust of me as an educator and a human’

Erica Nuss, a sixth grade teacher in the Antelope Valley, knew she wanted to be an educator since she was a child.

“I was very fortunate to always love school and be passionate about school,” Nuss said. “I think as I was growing up, I didn't really realize the difference of school experiences for different people because I loved it.”

That’s why, in her 15-year career, Nuss has worked to get all kids excited about education. That also translates to her work on the union’s equity team where Nuss has been working with her union on contract language to bolster equity and inclusion for teachers.

Erica Nuss is a sixth grade teacher in the Antelope Valley.

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Zaydee Sanchez

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A book about Stonewall sits in Nuss’s home library .

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She works in a much smaller district than LAUSD.

Nuss is one of the only public lesbian educators in her small Antelope Valley school district. She started the first equality club there after students came to her asking to learn about inclusive topics, so now they make posters and read books that center people of color and LGBTQ+ stories.

It started after a tumultuous time. In 2020, she was put on administrative leave while her district investigated claims of grooming with a student she was mentoring.

“[The student was] really struggling with issues at home and their own identity, and it just got really ugly,” Nuss said. “I think that there was a lot of mistrust of me as an educator and a human.”

The California Teachers Association stepped in, and Nuss said they helped clear her of the charges. LAist is not naming Nuss’s school because of concerns for her safety.

Though she is now at a new school, Nuss said she feels like she’s been labeled as a “gay troublemaker teacher” because of her past and inclusion of LGBTQ+ sources in her curriculum. But she believes that teaching students about people with different genders and sexualities helps save lives.

When LGBTQ+ youth have a supportive adult in their lives, data shows a 24% reduced risk for suicide. More than two thirds of LGBTQ+ students reported feeling unsafe in school because of their sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, according to GLSEN’s 2021 national school climate survey. Roughly half of California LGBTQ+ students surveyed reported being verbally harassed for their gender expression or sexuality.

Recently, Nuss taught students about Stonewall. She structured her lesson around a callout on the topic in her class’ curriculum, and she had to notify parents about it in advance.

“It's the first LGBTQ national monument in the country,” Nuss said. “If districts are even lucky enough to have a curriculum that includes Stonewall to begin with, does it still get skipped by people? I'm sure it does.”

A 2021 survey found more than two-thirds of LGBTQ+ students reported that their classes did not include any LGBTQ+ topics, but California is a bit of an outlier. State law says social studies and history classes should include the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

Part of this is the culture around the districts. She says her community in the Antelope Valley doesn’t have a large LGBTQ+ population.

“I worry that the way that I teach is going to somehow get spun by the community that I work in,” Nuss said. “Yet no matter how many hours a week or month I spend thinking about whether to do it or not, I feel like I have to.”

‘Reluctant to even believe that it was happening’

Last June, multiple fights at protests erupted after the Glendale Unified School District announced it would recognize Pride Month, something it had done for four years.

These incidents drew national headlines. But for one gay educator in Glendale, it was close to home. (LAist is not using the educator’s name out of safety concerns.)

Around the same time, a student at his school tore down a classmate’s poster recognizing an LGBTQ+Armenian author in a school library display celebrating the country’s culture.

The vandalism was a part of a slew of actions in the past year — ranging from a teacher’s ally flag getting covered up to an increase in homophobic language — he said were out of step with the school’s average student behavior.

“I was reluctant to even believe that it was happening,” the educator said. “To see that kind of animosity, that kind of tension and, you know, just the things students were saying to each other was really unfortunate.”

An anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrator yells at pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrators from behind a police barricade outside a Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) Board of Education meeting on June 20, 2023 in Glendale.

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The tensions inside the school mirrored what was happening outside. Parents, adults without kids in the school, and right-wing activists used the district’s Pride Month recognition to push for limits on LGBTQ+ education.

Anti-LGBTQ+ protests are usually focused on parents’ rights. But in Glendale, which has a large Armenian population, it quickly became about differences between Armenian conservative values and LGBTQ+ inclusion.

He felt like Armenians were being pitted against LGBTQ+ people.

“I think it was frustrating to see that this small, angry, vocal group, who was purporting to speak for our community, was getting media attention,” the educator said. “There was still the larger community who … was not being heard.”

That stuck out to the educator, who’s Armenian. He went to a school board meeting to share his thoughts last summer, but shortly after that, his name came up in social media posts. Since then, he said his personal information was shared and he received a death threat to his school email.

The educator doesn’t typically share his sexuality with students, but he also doesn’t hide it.

“If you’re an out educator and you’re teaching the mandated state curriculum of LGBTQ+ history,” he said, “are you then going to be accused of grooming kids, or trying to trick kids, or spread propaganda of some kind?”

A demonstrator holds a sign outside a Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) Board of Education meeting on June 20, 2023 in Glendale.

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These concerns remain, but he believes the community he grew up in is more accepting than its loudest LGBTQ+ detractors.

“I do love being here,” he said. “It’s a safe city, but I just have to work harder to make everyone feel safe and welcomed.”

The Genders and Sexualities Alliances student club at his school are already designing posters for this year’s Pride Month, in June, about bullying, microaggressions, and LGBTQ+ civil rights icons.