Shane Murnan thought he was living his professional dream when he was named principal of an elementary school. But it quickly soured after an anonymous newsletter highlighted his after-hours performances in drag.
The school began receiving threats weeks after his hiring. Anonymous callers told staffers that if Murnan, 52, came to his office, he would leave in a body bag, he said.
Days later, Murnan’s Oklahoma City home and John Glenn Elementary School were threatened with bombs, police told him.
Murnan, who has been working in public education for 26 years, had to move homes out of security concerns, and the district told him not to come in during school hours.
Eventually Murnan was asked to resign in January. The school district accepted his resignation earlier this week.
Oklahoma public schools superintendent Ryan Walters, who played a role in highlighting Murnan’s drag work, is calling for a regulation that would allow educators to be fired for “acts that excessively promote sexuality” outside of work.
When the newsletter V1SUT first posted about Murnan’s drag career and past criminal charges on Aug. 29, he said he felt supported by the school district, especially by Brayden Savage, the Western Heights School District superintendent.
“Being gay, I’ve been attacked my whole life,” Murnan told The Washington Post. “And this publication wasn’t even a very credible one, so I wasn’t as upset as the school district and Savage seemed to be for me.”
A few days later, Libs of TikTok, a right-wing social media influencer with a national following, posted about Murnan, and soon after Walters called for Murnan to be fired.
“I insisted on the removal of this person from Oklahoma schools from the beginning,” Walters told The Post in a statement Wednesday. “I will not allow the radical left to use our schools to indoctrinate our kids and promote the most extreme forms of sexual deviancy in the classroom and beyond.”
Other staffers’ jobs were also at risk.
Paul Stafford, a kindergarten classroom aide who was hired by Murnan in July and also works as a drag queen on nights and weekends at clubs in Oklahoma City, said he began worrying about his job after V1SUT mentioned him in a newsletter mid-fall, but the school district assured him that everything would be okay.
On the first day of the spring semester, however, Stafford, 35, who was honored as the school’s best support staffer in December, was asked to choose between accepting a termination letter or submitting his resignation.
When Stafford asked why they wanted him to leave, Savage and school representatives in the hastily called meeting said, “It’s because of the alter ego, your drag persona,” he told The Post. Officials noted the costs of extra security resources, as the school was still facing continued safety threats.
Savage and the school district did not respond to The Post’s request for comment. Savage told the Oklahoman the district had spent about $65,000 since August on additional security, administrative help and other costs.
“I began working in education recently, and it really ignited a passion in me,” Stafford said, adding that he was considering a career in public education when he was forced to resign. “But Savage and others straight-up said that I shouldn’t consider that while living in Oklahoma.”
In December, NPR reported that Walters was looking to amend the teacher code of conduct to ban educators who engage in certain activities, such as performing in drag.
In his statement to The Post, Walters said: “Teachers have a unique and sacred responsibility to the students and communities they serve. That is why I have proposed the most aggressive model in the nation for identifying and uprooting people who violate that trust from our schools.”
Murnan said the district’s handling of his first semester on the job was confusing.
The district put him on administrative leave in August, but he was still expected to keep working, first from home and then from the curriculum building on the main campus separate from the school building.
He was told he couldn’t enter his own office during school hours because of security concerns, but the district asked him to help another school in the district, Greenvale Elementary, and he was allowed in that building.
Murnan was asked to not come to school, but Stafford, also highlighted by the newsletter, was not given similar instructions.
Savage had supported Murnan through fall, issuing multiple letters that explained how the district had vetted and approved him before his hire and that said the criminal charges against him had been dismissed and expunged from his record, but she ended her support abruptly in December, Murnan said.
In a Dec. 15 meting with school staffers, Savage told the employees that Murnan wouldn’t return to the elementary school campus because she and the district were still receiving hate mail and threats, according to a video of the meeting obtained by NBC News.
Savage said that she was “not caving to Ryan Walters” but that bringing “Shane back to the building is a risk to safety for all. I cannot be totally sure that one of those crazies will not show up to, quote-unquote, cleanse the building, which is something I’ve seen over and over again.”
In January, Murnan said, he was again put on administrative leave, and soon after asked to sign a resignation letter and a confidentiality agreement to prevent him from publicly talking about the controversy. He refused the latter.
Murnan has been performing drag — currently as Shantel Mandalay — for as long as he has been an educator, and his two careers had never been a concern for an employer before last year. “My drag was not something we discussed at work, and I never let the two jobs cross,” he said.
In the fall, when things came to a head, Savage asked Murnan to “maintain a low profile,” he said, and he paused his drag performances.
Once he saw that the pause was not minimizing the security risks, Murnan continued doing drag.
“I needed to perform for my livelihood, for my sanity, and simply to feel better about things,” he said.
Other staffers at John Glenn were also affected by the aftermath of the newsletter and the subsequent bomb threats.
“After August, we couldn’t go two weeks without a new threat or article dropping on us,” said Kiley Keeling, a former instructional coach at John Glenn who has known Murnan for about a decade. “A lot of the teachers there are still dealing with PTSD.”
Keeling, 43, who has worked in education for 15 years, resigned from the elementary school in protest over how Murnan was treated and discriminated against, she said, as well as a lack of satisfaction with how the school was being run.
Murnan said the episode has created an environment of fear among teachers at school.
“People, especially educators, are scared because we don’t know who will be targeted next,” he said. “I was working in a dinner theater where people who are adults had to buy tickets to watch a show; it had nothing to do with my job at the school.”
For almost three decades, Murnan’s dream was to be a principal.
Now, he said, he’s not sure if he can ever return to public education.
Oklahoma principal forced to resign after outrage over drag queen work - The Washington Post
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