When Willie Carver Jr. won Kentucky’s 2022 Teacher of the Year award, he had no plans to leave the profession he was so passionate about. But a few months later, in June of last year, Carver suddenly announced he was departing his position as a high school teacher because of the constant discrimination and threats he said he faced as an openly gay man.
“I never had an easy time teaching. I was a gay man in the rural south,” Carver said. “But I felt called to do it, because I know that students need to see people who look like them, who come from where they come from.”
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