https://youtu.be/CnOJgDW0gPI
A Kansas teacher has been asked to resign after showing his students an anti-bullying film. Tom Leahy, a social studies teacher at Conway Springs Middle School, showed his students the 2011 short movie Love is All You Need, an anti-bullying film that depicts a fictional world in which heterosexual children are bullied by homosexual classmates.
The Wichita Eagle reports that Leahy said he was prompted to share the film with his eighth-graders after a lesson in American history earlier in the year took a disturbing turn.
The students were split into groups and asked to create fictional colonies, each with its own Bill of Rights to outline fundamental principles, Leahy said. At least one group wrote that homosexuals would not be allowed in its colony, he said, a move that upset some other students in the class.
“I was expecting fairly positive kinds of colonies: ‘Do things we think are right, and be nice.’ But it just kind of got twisted around, and it became a place where certain people weren’t allowed,” Leahy said.
“Then the issue of gay vs. straight came up, and a lot of them were not allowing gays into their colony and stuff like that. … There were some hard feelings. Kids were getting upset.”
After Leahy showed the film, the school’s superintendent and principal began getting calls from parents complaining about the movie being shown. Some were reportedly upset by the movie’s graphic end in which the heterosexual girl slits her wrists as she is unable to take the bullying any longer.
Leahy said he expected the film to create discussion and possibly upset some parents and others. But he didn’t expect the level of outcry that eventually led administrators to suggest he leave the district.
Watch the movie short above.
