Pendleton, Indiana – Kathy McCord, a guidance counselor at Pendleton Heights High School, was fired by the South Madison Community School Corporation board on Thursday by a majority vote.
For advising other instructors not to accept the district’s “Gender Support Plan,” which gives pupils a private form they can fill out notifying school officials of their chosen pronouns, McCord had been on administrative leave since December.
Also, students have the option of keeping that information secret from their parents or teachers.
“We all need to be tolerant, but I’m to the point in my life now where I realize someone taking a political potato masher– or in this case a ‘wokeism’ potato masher — and jamming it down my throat and saying I have to accept this…I don’t like that kind of thought,” Gary Reddick, a resident who came to the meeting in support of McCord, said.
Reddick described McCord as a “loving family person and educator.”
Buck Evans, a member of the school board, claimed McCord misled the board about delivering the paper to a reporter from the conservative news website the Daily Signal and making false and deceptive claims about the policy to the publication.
“Even if they voted to keep her, what student is going to trust her?” Reece Axel-Adams, a recent Pendleton Heights graduate, asked.
The board expressed concern over McCord’s decision to delay filing an appeal until so late in the disciplinary procedure.
“I haven’t really always been in tune to engineering, but now it’s something that I can really see myself doing,” Kuehn said.
The measure proposed by Goodrich was passed by the House with a unanimous vote; a Senate committee is currently reviewing it.
