VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. — Principal Lauren Dressback didn’t think much after it happened. She was close with Wesley Smith, the custodian at Cahaba Heights Elementary School. She called him “the mayor” because of his friendly demeanor. “Every day, a huge bear hug,” she recalled.
So, when Dressback, just after last Valentine’s Day, asked Smith to come into the nurse’s office and shut the door, and then shared three photos on her phone of who she had just started dating, it felt ordinary. Afterward, she said, “I just moved right on about my day.”
But the 2-minute, 13-second exchange — captured on video by the nurse — would prove fateful.
In a few short months, after a two-decade career, Dressback, a popular educator, went from Vestavia Hills City school district darling to controversial figure after she came out as gay, divorced her husband, and began dating a Black woman.
Within days of showing the custodian the photos, she was ordered to leave the building and was barred from district property. Soon, she faced a litany of questions from district leaders about a seemingly minor issue: employee timesheets. In April, she was placed on administrative leave. On May 2, during a packed school board meeting, she was demoted, replaced as principal, and sent to run the district’s alternative high school.
At that school board meeting, as he had for weeks, Todd Freeman, the superintendent, refused to offer an explanation. He read a statement that “we have not, cannot, and will not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, or disability.” When contacted, Vestavia Hills City Schools spokesperson Whit McGhee said the district would not discuss confidential personnel matters. Freeman and two other district officials involved did not respond to emails requesting interviews.
Despite Freeman’s assertion regarding personnel decisions, many in the community believe differently. “The Dressback situation” has lit up social media, supermarket conversations, and online chatter — and challenged allegiances.
“The entire situation has divided the community,” said Abbey Skipper, a parent at Cahaba Heights Elementary. Some people, she said, are “trying to label everyone who is on the side of Dressback as leftists or Democrats or radicals” and assuming “everyone who supports the superintendent and the board is a Republican — which isn’t true.”
A private Facebook group, “We Stand With Lauren” quickly gathered 983 members, while a public Facebook post by a fifth-grade teacher at Cahaba Heights complained of the “news frenzy and whirlwind of social media misinformation” and stated, “We Stand for Our Superintendent, Our District Office, Our Board, and our new principal, Kim Polson.”
Alabama has among the strictest anti-gay policies in the nation. This past legislative session, the House passed a bill to ban LGBTQ+ flags and symbols from schools. It also expands to middle schools the current “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits instruction or discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary schools. The bill died in the Senate, but its sponsor, Rep. Mack Butler, vowed to reintroduce it next session.
The bill was one of dozens introduced or passed in states around the country restricting classroom discussion of gender identity, books with LGBTQ+ characters, and displays of pride symbols. The laws have contributed to a climate in which “every classroom has been turned into a front,” said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN. She noted, “We’re seeing educators leave because of the strain of the job made worse by the political moment we’re in.”
Tiffany Wright, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, said many LGBTQ+ educators “are very on edge.” Wright and her colleagues have surveyed LGBTQ+ educators since 2007, with new 2024 data to be released in November. While the past decade has seen strides toward acceptance, “the regional differences are huge,” she said. “Folks in the South definitely felt less safe being out to their communities and students.”
While several states long had laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, it took a 2020 Supreme Court decision, Bostock v. Clayton County, to bring such protections to Alabama. That changed landscape spurred Dressback to engage lawyer Jon Goldfarb, who filed a complaint alleging work-based discrimination with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating. This fall, he expects to file a separate federal civil rights complaint.
A review of Dressback’s personnel file shows no reprimands until June, when she received an evaluation questioning her professional conduct that followed her filing the EEOC complaint. This raises a question: Why was she removed?
Dressback’s situation challenges her place in the white Christian, predominantly conservative community she belongs to and loves. And it offers a test case in a divided political time: Will her removal and the outcry that followed harden partisan alignments — or shake them? Even in Alabama, a Pew Research Center survey shows, more than one-third of those who lean Republican say homosexuality should be accepted.
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