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Karen Bailey-Summers (center), with her partner Elizabeth and their son Elijah, said she quit a previous teaching job due to homophobia from an administrator.
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HOME > NEWS > LOCAL
By: DYANA BAGBY
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Karen Bailey-Summers is about to start her second year teaching chorus and drama at Tucker Middle School and faces many of the same anxieties students face during back-to-school time — Can I be myself? Will they gossip about me? Will I be fully accepted for who I am?
As an openly lesbian teacher in the DeKalb County School System, Bailey-Summers said her overall experiences have been positive. Fellow faculty and staff, for the most part, accept her and her family.
But two years ago, after teaching for 10 years at a middle school near Emory University (she asked the school’s name not be used) where she was very open and accepted, a new, anti-gay administrator started working at the school. She claims the administrator harassed her in small ways, such as not approving field trips or purchase orders.
“At this school, I was very close to the students and to their parents and everyone was wonderful,” she said. “But [the administrator] was very homophobic — he didn’t want gay teachers in the school,” she said.
Bailey-Summers acknowledged some at the school told others they didn’t agree with her “form of lifestyle” but never said that to her face.
And while Bailey-Summers was open at the school about her sexual orientation, her partner and 6-year-old son, many gay teachers stayed closeted.
No longer comfortable at the middle school — where faculty and staff gave her and her partner a large baby shower — Bailey-Summers transferred to Tucker Middle School in 2005.
“It really tore me up to leave that school," she said. "I had built that program from the first year of the middle school, so it meant a lot to me.”
At Tucker, Bailey-Summers is out to some, but is cautious who she tells until she gets a better feel of the school environment.
“I’m not quite as open, but there are several ‘family’ members who teach there,” she said.
But come Aug. 7, when Bailey-Summers is mandated to attend a DeKalb County School System mandatory faculty member at the anti-gay mega-church New Birth Missionary Baptist Church led by Bishop Eddie Long, she acknowledges she will be wary.
Long, whose church boasts some 25,000 members, led a march in 2004 against gay marriage and his church offers a ministry named "Out of the Wilderness" that claims to help gay men and lesbians "convert" to heterosexuality.
Dale Davis, spokesperson for the DeKalb County School System, said Long’s church in Lithonia was selected simply because it was large enough to hold the entire faculty of the system for the school superintendent to address.
“The selection of Bishop Eddie Long's church was based on one thing — his church could handle the capacity,” Davis said. “We have over 7,000 teachers in DCSS. Also, the cost of using the church was minimal. We have attempted previously to use other large churches as well as other non-sectarian facilities. Either the facility was unavailable or the cost prohibitive.”
Davis acknowledged the system did receive complaints from some faculty members about the meeting being held at New Birth, so an alternative venue was made available at the DeKalb William Bradley Bryant Technology Center in Decatur.
“The district offered a different venue because a very small number of teachers had communicated that they were uncomfortable in Bishop Long's church. We respected their opinions and therefore provided an alternative site,” Davis said.
The DeKalb County School System does not include sexual orientation in its nondiscrimination policy, Davis added.
Jesse McNulty, known as Sir Jesse of Decatur, is a “queerly straight” transgender man who works with special needs students in the DeKalb school system, and has never tried to hide his identity.
He has taught in hostile school environments, he said, but overall he said DeKalb County is very understanding and “concerned with justice regardless of individual characteristics.”
McNulty, however, said he is leery the DeKalb system is holding a mandatory faculty meeting at New Birth — he protested at the church when Coretta Scott King’s funeral was held there last year, and he also protested Long’s 2004 march against gay marriage.
“This is a big issue for me and I’ve been talking to different folks about it. I don’t think it’s right,” he said.
An Atlanta charter schoolteacher who asked only his first name, Stefan, be used, said while he is totally out to faculty members where he teaches, he does fear the school’s socially conservative board of directors.
When he learned DeKalb teachers were mandated to attend a meeting at New Birth, Stefan said he felt sorry for the teachers who can either ...
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