Due to limited data, we know little about the prevalence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) educators. Using the American Community Survey and Census Pulse, we examine the representation of LGBTQ+ individuals in PK-12 teaching. We find that 3.3-3.5 percent of LGBTQ+ individuals are teachers; in contrast, 4.4-4.9 percent of…

Iowa's Senate File 496 requires parent permission to formally survey students about their mental health, bans the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools before 7th grade, mandates schools obtain parental permission to use a nick name, and bans any books that depict or describe sex acts in schools. This exploratory case…

Many of the most tangible and immediate political conflicts in American's lives occur at the local level. Yet, we lack large-scale evidence on how, why, and where conflict occurs in local governments. In this paper, we present a new dataset of nearly 100,000 videos of school board meetings, and a new measure of local political conflict. We use and…

Over the past several years, there have been numerous legislative attempts to limit discussion of race and gender/sexuality in K-12 schools and higher education in the name of parental rights. As this is written, sixteen states have banned the teaching of "Critical Race Theory" (CRT) and additional legislation is being considered in…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which cyberbullying prevention and intervention efforts were provided at different school levels (i.e., elementary, middle, and high). In the first journal article, the extent to which the frequencies of cyberbullying teacher trainings differ by school level was…