This image from Facebook shows Hilton Head Island Middle School, the workplace of a SC teacher who has filed a libel lawsuit against parents that have harassed her for asking students their preferred pronoun.
At Hilton Head Island Middle School (HHIMS) in South Carolina, a computer sciences teacher, Mardy A. Burleson, is fighting back with a lawsuit after parents accused her of “grooming” students. Burleson handed out questionnaires, asking each students’ preferred pronoun.
The harassment toward Burleson started at the beginning of the school semester in January 2023. Following reaction to the survey, which was uploaded to Google Classroom and was available for parents to see, Burleson explained that the list of 29 questions was made with the intention of helping her get to know her new students.
The questions ranged from their preferred name, pronouns, and if each student taking the survey wanted Burleson to use their pronouns “in class and in messages home or is it private between you and me?”
Controversy arose when one of the students showed the survey to her parents, David and Susanna Cook, who then contacted the HHIMS school principal about it. While the principal and Burleson worked with each other to alter some of the questions to resolve some of the complaints, the situation continued to escalate.
David Cook is no stranger to the national news cycle, previously making headlines in June 2023 after throwing a handful of chicken feed at Beaufort County School Board members during a meeting that month, as a bizarre form of protest for not banning a number of contested books from the school system’s libraries.
Cook reportedly said during his actions, “There’s your chicken feed. I give you this gift as a way to demonstrate mine and many others’ opinion of your lack of action. Chicken. Too afraid. Matter of fact, your behavior gives chicken a bad name.”
The sheriff’s office issued Cook a no-trespass order for all district campuses after that night, only allowing him permission to pick up his daughter after calling the school and to attend board meetings.
The libel lawsuit being filed by Burleson names five people, including Cook; Thomas Beach, a Republican state representative for South Carolina and member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, Corey Allen Whittington, author of the right-wing blog The Overton Report, who explicitly named Burleson’s trans son in his writing, Michael Covert, a former Beaufort County Council member, and Elizabeth Szalai, a parent and local conservative activist who issued a list of up to 97 books to be pulled from the Beaufort School District for “pornographic content” (Cook was also involved in the creation of that list). Of the five defendants, two do not live in the county.
As for the specific “groomer” accusation, Whittington reportedly talked about the survey on a podcast and in a story published in his blog. He accused Burleson of “grooming” students and also claimed she gave undisclosed surveys about sex to … [students] that she indicated should not be shared with parents.