Pierce County teacher and drag king resigns from school district amid cyberbullying
An English teacher resigned from their teaching job last week through a mutual agreement with the Peninsula School District, after online trolls began attacking their after-hours profession as a drag king on social media and the information was amplified by a local conservative commentator.
The post that quickly turned into an online firestorm surrounding K Wayne, who uses they/them pronouns and has taught in the district since 2021, is an example of how social media cyberbullying has targeted LGBTQ+ students and staff in the district for the last several years, Wayne told The News Tribune.
“We can confirm that K Wayne chose to resign, and we wish them well in their future endeavors,” Peninsula School District spokesperson Danielle Chastaine told The News Tribune via email on Oct. 1.
She declined to comment further about matters involving district personnel. The district understands “the importance of stability in the classroom,” she wrote. Peninsula High School administrators chose an experienced long-term substitute teacher to teach Wayne’s classes and informed staff and families of Wayne’s students of the changes, according to Chastaine.
Wayne was hired in 2021 to teach social studies at the Global Virtual Academy based at Henderson Bay High School. That year, they also served as a drama director at Gig Harbor High School, then transferred to teach English at Peninsula High, where they taught up until their resignation.
As of Sept. 30, Wayne is no longer employed by the district after their teachers’ union came to an agreement with district administrators that involved their resignation. Wayne made clear it was a decision both sides supported.
“I don’t want people thinking that the district pushed me out,” Wayne told The News Tribune via video call. “It was very much like we were in communication with each other, and they wanted to make sure that I was OK. And I wanted to make sure that I was listening to myself.”
Wayne has been doing drag, a performance art form that plays with gender expression using costumes and other elements, since 2018. They saw a drag king, or a drag performer who expresses male gender stereotypes, for the first time at a show that a friend was in, shortly before they began studying for their master’s degree in teaching.
Wayne has loved performing since they were young and grew up participating in drama camps, acting lessons and school plays. Performing drag and satirizing male stereotypes with their character, Jack King Goff, is a natural progression of the skills and experiences they’ve had over the years, they said.
They never brought it up in the classroom but told colleagues and supervisors about it when they were hired. The reason they didn’t tell students and their families was because they wanted to keep their two professions separate, Wayne said. They typically do drag on the weekends and sometimes Friday nights.
If students knew they were a drag king, that could be a distraction in the classroom and make it difficult to teach, according to Wayne.
They said that boundary became impossible once someone found Wayne’s official drag king Instagram page and identified them as a Peninsula School District teacher. Wayne thinks it’s possible someone recognized them from a drag performance, but that seems unlikely, they said.
That person sent screenshots of Wayne’s drag king posts to an Instagram page @phs_crazy which reposted them, according to Wayne and screenshots viewed by The News Tribune.
Multiple students at the Sept. 10 Peninsula School District board meeting identified @phs_crazy as an account that engages in cyberbullying. As of Oct. 3, 2024, the account no longer appears when searched on Instagram.
Wayne started getting a flood of notifications beginning Sept. 6 and into the weekend of the Gig Harbor High vs. Peninsula High Fish Bowl football game, Sept. 7-8.
“All these people are following me and commenting on posts,” Wayne said. “And I’m like, ‘What’s going on? It’s not like I’ve made a reel or something and it’s gone viral, something’s happened.’ And then I realized it’s a bunch of my former and current students.”
They immediately set the account to private and began blocking and deleting followers that they could tell were their students, former or current. By then, it was too late. Images from their drag king Instagram account spread to Facebook and started getting comments by parents and leaders in the community — some in support of Wayne, others not, according to Wayne.
Screenshots Wayne shared with The News Tribune showed parents in one Facebook group reacting to Wayne’s drag king account with concern or alarm for their students while others said their kids had positive experiences with Wayne as a teacher. Others defended Wayne’s right to have a personal life outside of school.
Wayne had been scheduled to meet with the Peninsula High School principal Monday, Sept. 9, to discuss a different subject, and they planned to add the situation developing online to the agenda. But Wayne decided to hold off after the teacher’s union advised Wayne it might not be safe to return to school.
One week of waiting became two, as Wayne continued to follow the advice of their union. During that time, the district allowed Wayne to remain on paid administrative leave and found a long-term substitute to fill in.
On Sept. 14, conservative commentator Brandi Kruse posted a video on her Facebook account as part of her show, “[un]Divided with Brandi Kruse,” publicly pointing out Wayne’s drag king identity and spotlighting posts and verbiage on their drag king Instagram. She said on the show her video was prompted by emails from concerned parents and referenced one post on Wayne’s drag king account from 2018 with the caption “Lock up your daughters. Jack King Goff is here,” arguing that it demonstrates “incredibly concerning behavior.”
That was the first post that Wayne made for their drag king character Jack King Goff, three years before they became a teacher, they told The News Tribune. Kruse didn’t mention that Wayne had been dressed up as a hair metal (a subgenre of heavy metal) musician at the time and the line, “Lock up your daughters,” was a reference to the 1981 song of the same name by the English rock band, Slade. It also appears in the song lyrics to a 1976 song by AC/DC called “T.N.T.” It’s an allusion to a reoccurring trope in heavy metal and fit the version of the early “Jack Goff” character Wayne was performing at the time, playing off of stereotypes of rock stars, they said.
Now, Wayne occasionally performs as a hair metal character, but their “Jack King Goff” character tends to wear suits and has other years of other lore behind him, they said.
The News Tribune reached out to Kruse for comment via the contact form on her podcast website.
“I said multiple times I don’t care if a teacher does drag and I myself enjoy attending drag shows,” Kruse responded via email Monday afternoon. “This was about the sexually explicit nature of his public profiles, which I said several times.”
After Kruse’s video was released, it became clear to Wayne that returning to teach would be impossible.
“I couldn’t do my job at that point because those kids are going to just think of that, and then whatever is being said at home is going to be compounded,” Wayne said. “So me as an authority figure, that’s no longer a reliable option anymore.”
They said they’re looking at coding and programming classes to pivot to a career in learning and development within the tech industry and moving back home to Los Angeles temporarily.
What Wayne went through is only a slice of what students in the district face on a daily basis, they said.
“They do not get the same attention as someone like me,” Wayne said. “The only reason I’m getting attention is because I’m a teacher and I am getting paid by taxpayers, and teaching already is also under a lot of scrutiny.”
Several students spoke up in support of Wayne, albeit without referencing them directly, at the Sept. 10 Peninsula School District board meeting. One of them was Henderson Bay High School student council president Noah Cedarland, whom The News Tribune interviewed for a separate story about the district’s response to cyberbullying.
Seeing a teacher get bullied online was the last straw for him and his three friends, who spoke out about the issue but were asked by Wayne not to share their name at the time, he told The News Tribune.
Cedarland wrote that he worked with Wayne in Gig Harbor High’s theater program and views Wayne as “an amazing teacher who cares for their students” and a person who made him feel safe as part of the queer community. Wayne helped Cedarland get through an anxiety attack, he wrote.
“If even a teacher can’t escape bullying . . . who am I a student to feel like things are going to get better?” Cedarland wrote.
Wayne was also the advisor for the Peninsula High School Gender and Sexuality Alliance at the time of their resignation. The club’s president this year, junior Eamon Glasscock, told The News Tribune via phone that the club is in full support of Wayne.
“We all love them and miss them and hope that they could even try to come back at some point in the future,” Glassock said. “And if they can’t, it’s really sad, but we understand why.”
Editor’s note: Part of an earlier version of this article mischaracterized when Wayne resigned. Wayne is no longer an employee of the district as of Sept. 30. The article has also been updated to include comment from Kruse.
This story was originally published October 7, 2024 at 10:00 AM.
