Stephanie is an amazing woman, she is also a mother, a wife, and a teacher. Her story is one that we saw a lot during the COVID pandemic that hit the world in 2020. As many different aspects of life began to rain down on the laps of education. There was a moment at the beginning of the pandemic when educators were hailed as frontline workers, very important people to the machine that runs America. But unfortunately, as the pandemic continued and the rhetoric about issues that were never a part of the educational system began to take over, and the lives of many teachers changed. And like them Stephanie found herself being accused of teaching falsehoods to the students in her history class when in fact she was teaching what she had read, what she had learned, and what everyone knew to be fact. She now stands before the school board, the community, her administrators, other teachers and her students and their parents to give her letter of resignation. She can no longer be an educator.

She can no longer stand in front of her students with the freedom to teach them the things that they need to know in order to leave her classroom saying that they have an understanding of what American History truly is. This resignation did not come lightly. It came on the heels of an attack on her and her family that was led by a group of people that decided that they would be judge and jury as to who she was as an educator. The number of teachers that are retiring early or leaving the field of education altogether since the beginning of the pandemic is staggering, numbers like we have never seen before. This is just one of the many stories of educators who had to make the most difficult decision, to leave the job that they love, the students that they live for, in the field that they are passionate about because they no longer felt safe in their own classroom and in their own skin.