A Wisconsin school board fired elementary school teacher Melissa Tempel on Wednesday after she sought to include Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton’s 2017 song, “Rainbowland,” in a spring concert. The song imagines a utopia in which everyone gets along.
This past March, the first-grade teacher had tweeted about how her bosses at Heyer Elementary School allegedly “banned” her class from singing the song since it “could be deemed controversial.” The message went viral. Ultimately, the School District of Waukesha Board of Education, according to WISN, claimed Tempel violated three of its policies, which was grounds for her firing.
“Ms. Tempel deliberately brought negative attention to the school district because she disagreed with the decision as opposed to following protocol and procedure and I believe that behavior is intolerable,” the district’s superintendent, James Sebert, said of the decision.
“I thought that the fact that the tweet that I made, that ‘Rainbowland’ wasn’t going to be allowed, was something that the public would be really concerned about and that they would be interested in knowing about it,” Tempel said in her defense at an hours-long hearing.
The district had placed Tempel on leave on April 3, and as of May, Sebert had written a letter to the board recommending her termination. While WISN reported that her termination was due to her public disagreement with her superiors, Tempel’s lawyer claimed she was exercising her right to free speech.
Billboard reports that the school’s principal, Mark Schneider, told the Board he never thought the song should be banned. The board’s decision to fire Tempel nevertheless, was unanimous: 9-0.
Dozens of Tempel’s supporters stood outside the hearing in silent protest of the proceedings inside.
When the controversy went viral in March, Cyrus’ Happy Hippie Foundation, which supports young LGBTQ+ people and those facing homelessness, made a donation to Pride and Less Prejudice, which furnishes pre-K through third-grade classrooms with LGBTQ-inclusive books.
A tweet from Happy Hippie quoted lyrics from the song: “We are rainbows, me and you/Every color, every hue/Let’s shine on through … TOGETHER WE CAN START LIVING IN A RAINBOWLAND.” It also said, “When our founder, Miley Cyrus, and her fairy godmother, Dolly Parton, wrote these words together, they meant it.”