Email Share 3K Shares

LEWES, Del. — A highly acclaimed teacher and theater director at a high school in Delaware near Rehoboth Beach who served as faculty adviser for the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance Club was forced to submit her resignation earlier this year based on what students and parents believe to be anti-LGBT bias.

Martha Pfeiffer, who heads the theater department at Cape Henlopen High School in the city of Lewes, is scheduled to end her seven-year stint at the school when the spring 2017 semester ends on June 16.

Her departure follows a stormy two-year period in which students, parents and others who know Pfeiffer say she was hounded by school administrators for what her supporters say was her outspoken support for the school’s LGBT students in her role as a committed straight ally.

“They were out to get her for years,” said a former school employee who spoke on condition of not being identified. “I think it was pretty much a trumped up charge against her.”

The former employee was referring to a decision by the superintendent of the Cape Henlopen School District, Robert Fulton, to charge Pfeiffer with negligence and other alleged violations for not escorting a group of nine theater students on a bus trip home from New York City last December, where she took them to see a Broadway play.

Parents who know Pfeiffer said she was also charged with disloyalty and willful and persistent insubordination, charges that the parents believe are linked to Pfeiffer’s past actions supporting LGBT students in a manner deemed overly aggressive by the school administration and school district in conservative-leaning Sussex County, which was won by Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election.

Pfeiffer declined to be interviewed for this story, saying she fears further repercussions from school district officials if she were to talk to the media.

But students and parents who know her, including Linda Gregory, president of the Lewes-Rehoboth Beach chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or PFLAG, told the Washington Blade the superintendent’s allegations were inaccurate and misleading.

According the parents and students familiar with the New York trip, Pfeiffer became stricken with severe back pain while in New York that was linked to a serious injury from a car accident that occurred several years earlier.

When she determined she could not ride on the bus going back to Delaware, students and parents said, Pfeiffer arranged for an adult chaperone and another teacher to accompany the students from the theater to the bus, which was parked a little over a block away, and on the bus for the return trip to Delaware.

“There was a group of parent chaperones and they had another teacher with them,” Gregory told the Blade. “And so she was in pain and she told the mother chaperone who was in her group, ‘I’m in pain. I need to take medication and I know you will be able to find the bus and get the kids back on the bus,’” Gregory recalled Pfeiffer telling her.

“So she did not ride home on the bus with the students because she couldn’t,” Gregory said. “She was in that much pain. And these were 17 year olds and 18 year olds anyway,” said Gregory, who noted that at no time were the students left unescorted by an adult.

Gregory and other parents familiar with the New York trip said they were shocked when they learned that at Fulton’s request, the Cape Henlopen district school board voted to fire Pfeiffer for cause at a school board meeting in January. The vote to fire her came after Fulton suspended her while officials were conducting an investigation into her handling of the New York trip, sources familiar with the school said.

Sources familiar with the school also said that Fulton’s action came after the school’s principal, Brian Donahue, looked into the New York trip matter and did not recommend that Pfeiffer be fired.

After consulting with representatives of the Cape Henlopen Education Association, which serves as a teachers union, Pfeiffer reportedly agreed to an offer by the school district that allowed her to resign and retain her benefits and teaching license, which could have been in jeopardy if she were fired.

The resignation offer came while Pfeiffer was suffering from sharp abdominal pain that a few days later was diagnosed as acute appendicitis that required emergency surgery for an appendectomy. Friends said that in the midst of the appendicitis attack she had to decide whether to accept the resignation offer or reject it and request a hearing to appeal the firing by a deadline one day later. Under what Pfeiffer considered duress she accepted the resignation offer, people familiar with the situation said.

Fulton initially wanted her to leave immediately, but according to parents and others who know Pfeiffer, Pfeiffer argued that if she left in January there would be no one available to direct and coach the students for the plays and shows that were planned for the spring semester, including the musical “Aida.”

In the past year other shows performed by the students under Pfeiffer’s direction included “Romeo and Juliet,” “Laramie Project,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: An Evening with Poe.”

Shortly before the school board voted to fire Pfeiffer, one of her theater students won first place in the Delaware state division of the English Speaking Union’s National Shakespeare Competition, which was held Jan. 28 at Cape Henlopen High. Pfeiffer has been credited with successfully coaching the student, senior Hannah Lowe, who became the third Cape Henlopen theater student in the past six years, under Pfeiffer’s coaching, to win first place in the state ESU Shakespeare competition.

School officials a short time later agreed to allow Pfeiffer to retain her job until the end of the spring semester, prompting some parents of theater students to question the legitimacy of the forced resignation.

Ginny Collins, the mother of two daughters who have attended Cape Henlopen High School, called the allegations that Pfeiffer was negligent for allegedly abandoning students on the New York field trip “a complete and utter falsehood.”

“This is a teacher who goes above and beyond in her job to help these kids,” said Collins. “She stands up for these kids, gay and transgender and bisexual.”

Kathryn Robinson, another parent of a student at Cape Henlopen High, said she got to know Pfeiffer over the past year since her son became involved in the theater program.

“When it comes to the theater, she’s done so much for the kids,” Robinson said. “These kids look up to her. I can’t even express how much that teacher means to a lot of those students, and the reason why they’re where they are and the colleges they’ve been accepted to are because of her.”

Added Robinson, “And you know they definitely 100 percent have it in for her. They just absolutely don’t like her.” Robinson was referring to the school administration and school district officials.

When asked by the Blade to respond to claims by parents and students that Pfeiffer was forced to resign over false allegations in connection with the New York field trip, Fulton said he could not disclose details surrounding the resignation due to privacy rules related to personnel matters.

“Ms. Pfeiffer submitted a letter requesting to resign from her teaching position and our Board of Education approved her request,” Fulton said in an email. “The resignation will occur at the end of the school year,” he said.

“Your additional questions are related to district personnel and because of the privacy rights of employees, I cannot comment on them,” Fulton said.

Students come to Pfeiffer’s defense

More than a half-dozen students currently enrolled at Cape Henlopen High School who identify as LGBT and who know Pfeiffer as theater students or in her role as faculty adviser for the Gay-Straight Alliance Club reached out to the Blade to express their concern over Pfeiffer’s impending departure from the school.

“I believe their actual reason for firing her is because all of the support she gives for all of us, that she advocates for us, that she always sticks up for us and they don’t like it and they don’t like her,” said Nathaniel ‘Nate’ Linton, a 10th-grade theater student at the school who identifies as gay.

“And they’re against her,” Linton continued. “And frankly I feel like they are against us. So I feel them firing Ms. Pfeiffer is a way of kind of silencing us, trying to put us down, condemning us.”

Linton’s boyfriend, Scott Nye, a Cape Henlopen senior and theater student who escorted Linton to the senior prom last month, said he agrees with Linton’s assessment but acknowledged he has not personally experienced discrimination for being gay from his fellow students.

“I don’t really feel like anyone attacks me for being gay except for certain teachers,” he said.

Nye and Madison Couture, a ninth-grade student who identifies as a transgender woman, are among several Cape Henlopen High students who expressed concern that while forcing Pfeiffer to resign, school officials have failed to take any action against other teachers who make disparaging remarks about LGBT people.

“They keep teachers that make homophobic, racist and transphobic remarks to the students but they can take away a teacher that’s actually fighting for what’s right and fighting for her students in any way possible,” Couture told the Blade.

“It really hurts me and it makes me really emotional,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to go to her for the next three years of my high school life. If I have a problem I don’t know who I will confide in and go to.”

Couture, Nye and at least three other Cape students have identified the school’s Family and Consumer Sciences Department teacher Alayna Aiken, who teaches a class called Human Development, as someone who has made disparaging remarks about homosexuality and LGBT people.

Couture said Aiken insisted on calling her by her birth name after she transitioned as a trans woman, a gesture that Couture considers disrespectful, hostile and discriminatory based on her gender identity.

Sondra Jones, a ninth grade student who identifies as a lesbian, said she was startled when Aiken singled her out for negative remarks in the classroom, telling her she should consider undergoing shock therapy to change her sexual orientation.

“Earlier in the school year she asked the class, ‘Who is gay? Let’s get it out in the open,’” Jones told the Blade. “I raised my hand and a friend raised her hand,” she said.

“She then said I should get electro shock therapy because homosexuality leads to pedophilia and murder and that it’s wrong,” Jones continued. “She said being a lesbian is one of the most disease-ridden lifestyles. She said that to me, too.”

“She also told me I should not be gay because God would not want it.”

Justin Jones, a psychiatrist and father of Bella Jones, a Cape Henlopen High freshman who are not related to Sondra Jones, said he decided to contact school officials after his daughter and other Cape students he talked to told him similar stories about Aiken’s alleged disparaging remarks about LGBT people in the classroom.

He said that at one point earlier this year Bella Jones became so distressed over Aiken’s views on a number of issues, including abortion, that she skipped Aiken’s class and got into trouble with the school administration. Justin Jones said that prompted him to drive to the school and ask to speak to Principal Donahue.

“These are the kinds of things I’m concerned about,” he said in discussing Aiken’s reported comments in class. “She’s making these very outlandish connections between lifestyles that she disagrees with on moral grounds and connects them to the sort of perversities like pedophilia,” Jones said.

“My child has values. I have values. We have beliefs in high powers and being good, decent people,” he told the Blade. “But you know at school, I want my child to be taught facts. I’m not sending her there to be preached to, to be necessarily moralized and certainly not given an unbalanced view on these issues.”

Jones said that since the claims by the students about Aiken’s alleged remarks are allegations that he has not heard first hand he asked the school administration to conduct an investigation.

“There are enough students complaining that they should take it seriously,” he said. “They were very nice and they heard me out and they asked me to write a letter, and so I did. It’s been six weeks or something like that and they haven’t responded,” Jones said.

Aiken couldn’t immediately be reached for comment this week. In June 2014 when the Blade interviewed other Cape Henlopen students who told similar stories about Aiken’s alleged classroom comments about homosexuality, the Blade reached her by phone at the school. She strongly denied making inappropriate or disparaging remarks about any students.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about because students are allowed to express their own thoughts,” she said. “There are no disparaging comments. I have a very open dialogue in my classroom and freedom of ideas. I facilitate classroom discussions.”

Aiken added that she encourages students to express “competing ideas” on a wide range of topics. “It is what it is,” she said.

Arianna Carpenito, a Cape Henlopen senior who identifies as a lesbian, said she was suspended from school last month for wearing a T-shirt she made bearing the words, “Cape condones racism, homophobia, sexism and bullying.”

She said the suspension, which came after she initially declined to put on another shirt and remove the T-shirt, demonstrates that the school does not allow a free exchange of ideas.

Carpenito said she was prompted to make and wear the T-shirt after hearing about an incident in which a female student wrote the “N” word on a lab table in a science class that appeared to target a black student in the class. The student’s friends reportedly posted the racial slur on social media.

Although the student was suspended for several days, Carpenito and some of the other LGBT students who spoke with the Blade said they don’t believe the school responded in a forceful enough way to the incident.

The Cape Gazette newspaper published an editorial on May 22 supporting Carpenito’s right to wear the shirt she made, saying she “stood up for herself and others by wearing her shirt and by bringing her concerns” directly to the school and the school district.

The LGBT students and their parents, meanwhile, said the banning of Carpenito’s T-shirt, which other students wore and were ordered to take off, the forced resignation of Pfeiffer, and the apparent tolerance by the school administration of Aiken’s anti-LGBT comments in class for the past three years or longer show that the school is at best insensitive to the concerns of LGBT students.

Principal Donahue, who is retiring at the end of the spring semester this month, has disputed such claims, saying the school prohibits anti-LGBT discrimination and supports its LGBT students. He has pointed to the school’s welcoming of the Gay-Straight Alliance Club when it was formed several years ago as a clear sign that LGBT students are welcome at the school.

“I’m really sad that Mrs. Pfeiffer won’t be at the high school next year because she has been a tremendous advocate and support for the kids,” said Gregory of PFLAG. “And I’m just worried about who will be that person for them. Who is that safe person that they can go to and talk with? Who will champion their cause? I am concerned.”