“When you are allowed to be the voice for so many, you cannot accept silence because silence is betrayal,” says Brett Bigham (above with President Obama), the 2014 Oregon State Teacher of the Year and the 2015 Oregon Education Association Teacher of Excellence, in an email. Bigham is part of an event at The Village Wednesday night at 7:00pm featuring GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings and his new book, One Teacher in Ten in the New Millenium. Bigham wrote an essay for Jennings’ book and is scheduled to appear on a panel discussion.
Bigham’s story is harrowing. The first special education teacher to win such top awards, Bigham, 51, was also awarded the “Teacher Role Model Award” at the NEA Convention this summer for standing up to his Multnomah Education Service District when they ordered him not to say he was gay in public. In fact, he was ordered not to say or write anything 24/7 without prior district approval. A planned visit to a local GSA, for instance, was cancelled because, the district said in writing, “meeting with those students has no value to the district.”
Bigham filed federal and state complaints. But the district held fast: when he did speak up—at the White House and elsewhere—he was fired. He was eventually re-instated, only to be threatened again with firing and was basically blackmailed, he says, into accepting a settlement offer—even though the state Bureau of Labor and Industries found “substantial evidence of discrimination.”
“To make it short,” he says, “in the end I was paid $140,000, the state investigation found retaliation, illegal firing and discrimination, two board members were overturned in the election and a third resigned right after. It was a huge shake up but a big victory for the gay teacher. This all just ended this summer. It was insane to be the Teacher of the Year and to be in a firestorm such as this!”
Even the essay he submitted for Jennings’ book was required to first be submitted for approval. “I decided they had no right whatsoever to do so and I submitted it without allowing them to see it,” Bigham says. In it he writes:
“[Being told GSAs had ‘no value’] was heartbreaking to me. When I was 15 my best friend killed himself after telling me he was no longer into girls. You cannot go back in time and undo a suicide, but I knew by being openly gay and Teacher of the Year would show those gay youth, teetering on the edge of ending their lives, that they had a future ahead of them. My district said those kids had “no value.”
Bigham deeply understands how silence can equal death and he was willing to “go to war” with his district to prevent it. Here’s his story of how he came out at the White House when he was there honored as one of the teachers of the year:
I had an order I was not allowed to speak by my district. But when the White House Press Corp asked if there were any teachers who wanted to make a Statement, I said to the teacher in front of me, “Pardon me, but I’m coming out of the closet” and I stepped up to the microphone.
I said: ‘As one of the first openly gay teachers of the year, I am so pleased to be sending a message to our gay youth that there’s a future ahead of them. 30% of all teen suicides are by gay youth and these laws that we’re passing across the states that demean gay people and make our youth feel terrible about themselves need to stop. And I’m very pleased to be the person standing up here and asking for that to stop.”
As I walked away my legs turned to rubber because I knew I had just violated my school district’s order. And not on a small scale, but at the White House to the international press corp and on a worldwide stage.
The following Monday, I was giving a speech to the Oregon Education Association. My speech had already been approved by the district. But as I stood on the podium I felt this steely reserve just welling up inside me. This fierceness that I didn’t quite know I had before. And I looked out at the audience and told them I was told to give the approved speech or else. And I threw it aside and I spoke from the heart and gave one barnburner of a speech! (See video below)
But, Bigham says, “for every bad thing that happened to me, something amazing happened, as well!” After all the hue and cry his illegal firing made international news.
“That morning the Nigeria Times ran an article with photos of my husband [Mike Turay] and I in the Rose Festival Parade and another photo in the US Capitol Building following our meeting with Sen. Jeff Merkley,” he says. “My life was falling apart but when is the last time an LGBT youth opened the newspaper in Nigeria and saw positive pictures of a gay couple being celebrated in a Parade and being married?”
And LGBT youth at home were appreciative, too:
“After being fired, I met with the Benson High School GSA and a young lady thanked me and told me that I had made her feel like she was worth everything. That I had been fired for her—and as she said it, tears were welling up in my eyes. I had done it for her. I had done it for all those struggling kids. I had done it for my best frient who, when I was 15 came out to me and then killed himself that weekend. I’ll get another job. He won’t. Those gay kids that are so beaten down they take their own lives won’t. Sometimes sacrifice comes at a high price. So be it.”
One final note on that settlement. Bigham, who’d recently had a “widow-maker heart attack,” says the district
“began going public with lies about my attendance and performance. They turned out confidential personal information to the press, including my social security number and copies of my W-9 form which were published online causing me to have to freeze my banking accounts….
The final straw was a letter from the district threatening me that if I did not take their settlement offer, they were going to go public with a two page letter of made-up performance issues that would have smeared me all over again. The letter contained vague comments that I possibly might have exposed students to inappropriate materials and that I may have possibly put them in danger. They had no paperwork to substantiate it, they had no documentation of the issues that, by law, they had to turn over to the union but could not do so, but they were willing to destroy me publicly if I did not take the settlement. Not to mention, if they had such documentation, by law, they would have had to turn it over to the state since we are mandatory reporters if we even suspect someone is putting a child in danger or exposing them to inappropriate materials. …
But taking the settlement was the right thing to do at that point. The change had happened. New school board members were promising reform and I left with vindication that the state had found the district had done what I said they did.
Bigham says that he started a GoFundMe account during the battle to pay legal fees. He paid $40,000 of the $140,000 settle to the lawyers. And with the $4,500 collected from the account, he gave “a chunk of money to Club Funder, a group that will fund the creation of a GSA group at any school in the country or help pay for
GSA activities through their grant program.” He also bought a book for every student of one of Arkansas’ lowest performing schools through Scholastic Books and helped pay to build a greenhouse for a rural school in Peru through Peru Challenge, thus providing poor children healthy food.
Bigham says:
Giving away the money, that was so kindly donated to us to fight the district, has been very healing. There is some darkness in my story but feeding kids, getting books in their hands, supporting LGBT youth against bullying and suicide are the butterfly effect of my district doing what they did.