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For 17 years, the office of Jackie Jackson-Dean has featured a familiar ornament of welcome: a safe space sticker, adorned with stars, a rainbow motif and an implicit message.

“I want these kids to be able to come to school,” she says, “and feel like at least one person here is safe to talk to.”

Jackson-Dean serves as a school psychologist and the LGBTQ liaison for Pasco County Schools in Florida. As a registered mental health counselor intern and member of the district’s crisis team, she knows better than most straight, cisgender allies what LGBTQ students face. She knows firsthand that safe spaces can be compromised. She also knows they can be reclaimed.

When Pasco County’s LGBTQ-inclusive guidelines became news fodder in the fall of 2018, Jackson-Dean suddenly became a target for those who opposed them. Strangers found her social media profiles, her personal website and phone number. Hateful messages rolled in.

“I hope you die,” some said. “I hope you get cancer.” “Kids would be better off if you were dead.” Eventually, she removed her contact information from the internet. She locked down her profiles. She stopped reading comment sections.

At home, the landline rang day and night. Jackson-Dean never answered.

“I became concerned about my personal safety,” she says. She wondered if the people sending messages would find her address and show up at her home.

But the sticker remains in her office. As the threats increased, as the media attention and scrutiny came crashing in, Jackson-Dean held on to reminders of why she does the work.

“When I would get letters from kids saying, ‘Thank you for standing up for me and who I am,’ I thought, OK, yes,” she says. “I can keep doing this, and I don’t really care what these people are saying.”

But these people had not arrived in her inbox by chance. Jackson-Dean was not picked at random by a movement that lost control. She was chosen.

And at the root of that campaign was Liberty Counsel.

What Happened in Pasco County?

According to Jackson-Dean, Pasco County Schools formed an LGBTQ advisory group as early as 2013. It included school nurses, psychologists, social workers and counselors. With everyone already shouldering full-time responsibilities, they didn’t make much headway changing policies or practices. But the conversation had begun.

Three years later, the district named Jackson-Dean as their LGBTQ liaison, offering one half-day a week to devote to the work. She began fielding questions, phone calls and emails from school leaders and educators across the district.

The answers she found led Jackson-Dean and a committee of educators to craft a districtwide best practices guide for supporting LGBTQ students. The guide was reviewed by the superintendent’s staff and the school board’s attorney. It went into effect, at first, with no incident.

In the fall of 2018, the first rumblings of a controversy began. That September, Jackson-Dean received a phone call. District policy did not require parents or guardians be informed when students join clubs, but a parent was concerned students could attend Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) meetings without their parent or guardian’s knowledge or consent.

Then, within two weeks, a P.E. teacher at Chasco Middle School in Port Richey refused to supervise the boys’ locker room after class. He felt uncomfortable supervising a space where a trans boy might change clothes. Despite school leaders’ attempts to handle the issue internally, the story made news.

“Everything kind of blew up after that,” Jackson-Dean says.

Principal Brandon Dahlin-Bracciale describes Chasco Middle School—located roughly 40 miles northwest of Tampa—as a caring and increasingly diverse student community.

He never expected that his school would end up at the center of a coordinated misinformation campaign and the resulting media maelstrom. Dahlin-Bracciale had spoken with the transgender student about where they’d change when they signed up for P.E. This was the first time a trans student at Chasco Middle requested such access, but the district’s guidance was clear: Students had that right.