Reporter
She’s Here. She’s Queer. She’s Fired.
The residents of Bloomburg thought they had everything they could want in basketball coach Merry Stephens— until she moved in with another woman.
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Stephens had not received a single reprimand during her four years in Bloomburg, but once Hendrick was promoted, she was called into his office or the principal’s on an almost daily basis. “They singled me out,” said Stephens. “I think they thought I would leave if they made my job miserable enough.” The harassment was also obvious to many of her colleagues. “The administration was determined to get rid of her,” said teacher Thresha Jones. “They would create things to write her up on so they could put it in her file.” Jones remembers when Stephens missed a day of school so she could attend her grandmother’s funeral; although the protocol was to inform the school secretary of a planned absence, which Stephens had done, she later received a stern written warning for failing to tell Hendrick himself. “If she ran to the store for five minutes, she was written up, but none of us ever were,” said Jones. “She was held to a different standard.” Some parents were troubled by what they saw as well. “She was put under the microscope at school, at basketball practice, at every game,” said Style’n’s Anna Doll, whose son graduated in May. “They made her life a living hell.”
By the end of the 2003—2004 school year, the pressure had become too much. Although Stephens was at the height of her career—the Lady Wildcats had gone to the finals only a couple months earlier—she was sleeping little, and for the first time in her life, she had begun to have panic attacks. Burned out, she decided to apply for a classroom position in hope of diffusing the situation. “I thought if I stopped coaching and got out of the limelight that the harassment would stop,” she said. “That was very hard for me, but I was desperate.” Stephens was given seven classes to teach starting last August, including an upper-level science course—an unusually heavy workload that often required her to put in eighteen-hour days to finish her lesson plans and grade homework. Dunlap became persona non grata as well. “Hendrick sent word through his secretary that my office was to be moved into a broom closet,” said Dunlap. “It had no heat or air and no room for a desk. Rain came in through the ceiling. I think Hendrick thought that I would quit right then and there, but I took it as a challenge. I decided I was going to do my job so well that they couldn’t fire me even if they wanted to.”
But on December 8, Dunlap was suddenly let go. “I asked Hendrick, ‘You’re firing me for what reason?’ and he couldn’t name one,” Dunlap said. Like most of the school’s support staff—from the custodian to the cafeteria workers—Dunlap was an “at will” employee and had no recourse; under Texas law, she could be fired without cause. After fifteen years of being entrusted to drive the district’s children to school, Dunlap was given less than an hour to pack up her things. Five days later, Lightfoot made a motion to fire Stephens as well. The school board voted 4—3 to begin proceedings to terminate her contract, alleging insubordination; Stephens was told to hand over her keys and grade book and was put on administrative leave. But when Michael Shirk, an attorney with the Texas State Teachers Association, began to take depositions in preparation for a hearing on Stephens’s proposed termination, it became apparent that the district had no case; unlike at-will employees, Texas teachers cannot be fired without cause. “What doomed these administrators from the start was their hubris and obvious bigotry,” noted Shirk. (Hendrick, principal Billy Don Frost, Lightfoot, Peacock, and other board members did not respond to interview requests for this story.) The district settled with Stephens and paid out the last year and a half of her contract after she agreed not to pursue any further legal action.
For Stephens, what stings the most is the belief held by some in Bloomburg that her sexual orientation made her unfit to teach. Helping to bolster this view was the fact that a former player of Stephens’s, who had since left for college, announced last year that she was a lesbian. In a move that Stephens believes sealed her fate with the administration, the girl’s parents met with the school board early last December and laid the blame for their daughter’s sexual orientation on her former coach. “I know that some people in Bloomburg think that being gay is contagious,” said Stephens. “And they think that whatever the school district had to do to buy out my contract was money well spent. But why on earth would I want any student of mine to be gay and have to go through the hell that Sheila and I have?”
IN THE END, THE SCHOOL board’s actions left many in Bloomburg uneasy. One of them was Tim Reed, the pastor at First Baptist Church. “Some folks here are proud of what happened,” he said as we talked in his office this May, two days before the school board election. “But there’s nothing to be proud of about what happened here.” Reed is not exactly liberal when it comes to social issues; for starters, he preaches that homosexuality is a sin. “But unless we’re going to remove every abomination from the school district, I don’t see why we should focus on one at the exclusion of all others,” he said. “Maybe we should have a crusade against gossipers too. Let’s cut their tongues out and run them out of town! There might be three of us left.”
In April, Reed had delivered a sermon that caused something of a sensation in Bloomburg. If Merry Stephens and Sheila Dunlap ever walked through the doors of First Baptist Church, he had instructed, members were to stand up, offer the women a seat, and make them feel welcome. “It’s easy to condemn people when you haven’t walked in their shoes,” he reminded the faithful. He went on to preach from John 8:7, in which Jesus cautions a mob that is preparing to stone an adulterous woman to death: “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” Reed gave his flock a meaningful stare from the pulpit and asked, “Who among you can cast the first stone?” His message resonated in Bloomburg, where some had begun to wonder aloud why certain school board members, who had been all too willing to sit in judgment on Stephens and Dunlap, did not cast a more critical eye on their own human failings. Others were upset that the school board had voted to remove Derous Byers as its president shortly after he gave his deposition in Stephens’s case. And still others pointed to the fact that the district had urgent business to attend to; the district’s accountability rating had dropped from “exemplary” to “acceptable.”
The school board election on May 14 became a referendum of sorts. Lightfoot was up for reelection, and one of his challengers was Suzanne Bishop, who had criticized his handling of the firings. Perhaps sensing that it might be a tight race, Lightfoot ran a half-page ad in the newspaper, next to a letter written by his pastor at New Hope Baptist Church. The pastor didn’t mention Stephens and Dunlap by name, but he might as well have. “If we don’t stand for God’s standards, He will remove His blessing from the school and the city,” it read. “If Believers hide from the sin and pretend not to see it, God will send His judgment…If you live in the Bloomburg School District you need to vote and have your voice heard!!!”
At seven o’clock in the evening on election day, when all the votes had been cast, locals gathered in the parking lot of Bloomburg High School to await the results. Lightfoot nervously circled the parking lot in his car. Peacock, whose term will be up next year, watched the proceedings from his front yard, across the street. Stephens and Dunlap had decided to get out of town for the weekend; both unemployed, they had driven to a county fair outside Beaumont to operate a concession stand. It was a way to pay the bills, since moving is not an option; although Dunlap’s daughter is grown, her son, who lives in town with his father, is still in high school. And for all the second-guessing that had swept through Bloomburg about the way in which the school board had stripped Stephens and Dunlap of their careers, there has never been talk of giving either of them her job back.
“There are more people here than at a ball game!” one woman exclaimed as she surveyed the forty or so people in the school parking lot.
“We should have brought our folding chairs,” said another.
At half past seven, Jerry Hendrick strode outside and announced that Suzanne Bishop had won handily, with 135 votes. Coming in a close second was a more conservative challenger, Brian Cloninger, who would get the other empty seat on the board. A cheer went up from the crowd as each name was called out. Of the five candidates, Lightfoot came in a distant last.
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