A Cobb elementary school teacher who was fired for reading a children’s book about gender identity to her students last year is suing the Cobb County School District for discrimination.
Katie Rinderle, who taught at Due West Elementary, was fired by Cobb Superintendent Chris Ragsdale and the Cobb Board of Education after she read “My Shadow is Purple” to students in March 2023. The book is described on its back cover as being about “gender beyond binary.”
Lawyers for Rinderle, along with Birney Elementary School teacher Tonya Grimmke and the Georgia Association of Educators, named the school district, school board, Ragsdale and Chris Dowd, the district’s executive director of employee relations and evaluations, as defendants in the suit.
Dowd led the investigation into Rinderle’s conduct that resulted in her firing. He garnered scrutiny during her fair dismissal hearing for being a member of the Atlanta Police Department’s controversial anti-drug Red Dog Unit, which raided the Atlanta Eagle, a gay nightclub, in 2009, before the unit was disbanded in 2011.