A middle school teacher has revealed he had quit his job after being told to remove a Pride flag from his classroom.
43-year-old Russell Ball is a father-of-five who was Three Rivers Middle School physical education teacher for just one year before he decided to file a resignation letter following a dispute with his superiors.
As the Michigan educator, who is openly bisexual, claimed, school officials ordered him to take down the Pride flag he had displayed in his classroom.
“After 10-plus years in education, I tendered my resignation today, drove home for the last time and won’t be returning,” Ball explained in his viral TikTok video.
The teacher went on to insist that he wasn’t making a political statement by displaying the flag in the classroom as he suggested his human rights were getting trampled.
“The Pride flag is not a political statement. It’s a human rights statement because we are all human. We should all have the same rights. But we don’t,” Ball added.
“By removing it, I feel like I’m being told I am invalidated, that I don’t belong. And that’s not a message I want to send to myself, or to any of my students, because regardless of sexual orientation and sexual identity, you belong, you matter. You always have a place in this world.”
As the father-of-five has since his unexpected resignation revealed, his partner has been supportive of his decision to stand up for what he believes in.
“The Pride flag stands for love, inclusion and equality – something that should be present in every single classroom across the country,” Ball says.
With no job to keep him busy, the PE teacher now plans on staying at home to look after his five children and get further engaged in activism.
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