WestEnder
May 5, 2010
Lisa Reimer has stood onstage before hundreds of people in her work as a children’s choir director, but the Vancouver schoolteacher’s life became public in a very different way last week.
Reimer’s coworkers at Little Flower Academy (LFA), an all-girls Catholic private school in Shaughnessy, learned Reimer is a lesbian when she requested parental leave for three weeks in April, at which time her female partner was due to deliver a baby. During the week before she planned to return to work, school officials contacted Reimer for a meeting. She says she was told to work from home until the end of the school year, a directive that effectively removed her from her teaching post. She had planned to return to work last Monday (Apr. 26).
Claiming she was dismissed from working at the school because of her sexual orientation and parents’ complaints about it, Reimer took the information to B.C.’s Pride Education Network (PEN) — an alliance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered educators — of which she is a member. The group issued a press release on the morning of April 28, and hastily called a press conference that afternoon. Reimer told reporters she felt like she’d been fired with pay. Students’ families, she said, were told she is on personal leave, which, in her view, is not true.
Later that day, LFA issued its own media statement, claiming Reimer had not been fired. “She remains in the services of LFA until June 30, and will continue to be paid accordingly,” wrote Celso Boscariol, chair of the board of directors for LFA. Of the meeting which led to Reimer’s dismissal from school property, Boscariol wrote, “A meeting took place between the school and the teacher to discuss projects consistent with the music theory curriculum. The school understood that her proposed role was acceptable and the matter was resolved.”
Reimer’s experience resonates with Roger Chin, an openly gay man who teaches at a Vancouver private school. “They [LFA administrators] probably thought they could get away with it because most gay employees just walk away, like I did at two teaching jobs and one physics job,” he says.
Chin, like Reimer, faced parental complaints at a private school where he was a teacher. The situation led to his teaching assignment being changed for the following year, and he eventually resigned. “It is more risky working in a private school as a gay teacher. You never know if criticism is hidden homophobia,” he says. “Some coworkers see me through gay stereotypes, and last month there was an incident of homophobia that the administration just bounced back to me to deal with alone. Most teachers here are tolerant but not necessarily inclusive or accepting enough to understand.”
Chin acknowledges that LFA is in a difficult position, in that staff need to respect employment laws but also respond to pressure from parents. “The response from [LFA] is probably the best response they can give,” he says. “In the private school system... there are no protections against the political pressure [or] bullying [from] parents.”
Moreover, Chin is worried about the message Reimer’s case sends to students at LFA. “The school’s actions seem counter to their mission statement...” he says. “Having grown up Catholic, I am still recovering from the homophobia spewed out by the Vatican and Catholic church. It looks like the abuse on gay students still continues.”
As yet, Reimer is unsure if she will take legal action. She plans to return to work with the Vancouver School Board in September, as she took the LFA position while on a two-year leave from Vancouver’s school district.
LGBT education advocate Glen Hansman, of the Vancouver Elementary Teachers Association, questions whether LFA’s actions fall in line with the BC Human Rights Code, which protects employees from harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation. “[LFA] gets public funds, like any other independent school in the province... Our expectation would be that it, too, has to operate under the BC Human Rights Code,” he says. “There’s no excuse for someone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans-identified being harassed in the workplace, let alone dismissed because they’re out.”
In the midst of widespread controversy over massive funding cuts to B.C.’s public-school system, Chin advises private-school administrators — who, like their public-school counterparts, receive provincial-government funds — to tread carefully. “I think private schools in general, and especially religious schools, will have to think carefully if they don’t want to be marginalized by the public system,” he warns. “There is great resentment building.”
PHOTO: Little Flower Academy. By Doug Shanks.
