Before Evelyn Fasking enrolled at the Magic City Acceptance Academy, their view as they walked from class to class was their shoes.
“I wouldn’t look up until I got to the door. Even if I bumped into someone, I would say sorry and just keep going,” Fasking, a member of the first graduating class of the school in Homewood, Alabama, said. “I was trying my best to avoid anyone looking at me at all because I knew that I would probably get laughed at or bullied in some way.”
Once Fasking started class at the Magic City Acceptance Academy (MCAA) in 2021, that changed. Now, they felt treated like a person and had the confidence to socialize in the hallways, or compliment their peers.
To the school’s founding principal Mike Wilson, the most striking sign that the academy is doing something right is seeing how students act in the hallway between classes.
“They’re chatting with their friends. They’re saying hello to different teachers as they go by,” Wilson said.
Students going to MCAA actually look forward to going to school, Wilson said. Parents tell him that hadn’t always been the case for their children.
Before going to MCAA, Fasking was failing classes as they struggled with the effects of bullying on their mental health. On top of that, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their classroom didn’t do them any favors. Starting their senior year of high school at the academy offered them a clean slate.
“Going back to my old school would have been a death sentence,” Fasking said. “MCAA made me into a person that I can not only bear to live with, but love being.”
Fasking is not alone. MCAA was founded in part to encourage students to “take ownership of their future” in an accepting environment for LGBTQ+ students, according to the school’s mission statement. While trying to meet that goal, the academy has trudged through a years-long battle to get its application approved by the Alabama Public Charter School Commission.
According to school administrators, each of the 240 students who enrolled at the academy when it opened in 2021 had experienced either discrimination at previous schools or difficulties with virtual learning, AL.com reports.
One student, Neo Nix, 15, came to MCAA as an 8th grader due to their previous school failing to adhere to his individualized education program, a plan made for students with disabilities that impact their classroom performance.
One thing Nix said he struggles with is trauma due to past events in his childhood.
“One of our first ELA (English Language Arts) assignments at that school was ‘Write about your most traumatic memory, and write a happy ending for yourself,” he said. “That was in sixth grade, and they already knew about my past because it’s in my IEP.”
Nix said he had also been punished and yelled at at their previous school for having panic attacks.
Daniel Evans, an 11th and 12th-grade history teacher at MCAA, said that faculty and staff at the school use trauma-informed practices while interacting with students.
“We don’t come in and holler and get everybody’s attention, because that’s not a trauma-informed practice,” Evans said. “We don’t come in front of the kids and tell them to shut up and sit down. Because a lot of our kids will be triggered by that.”
It’s impossible, however, for the academy to shield students from all instances of triggering or traumatic events, especially due to the controversial opening of MCAA.
During the Alabama gubernatorial primaries in May 2022, Republican candidates attempted to knock incumbent Kay Ivey out of her well-established foothold in the state, which led to an unexpected television ad that shook the lives of people at MCAA.
Tim James, a businessman and son of a former Alabama governor, ran multiple campaign ads throughout the spring of 2022 in which he called MCAA a “transgender public school” and showed photos of students and faculty without their consent at a drag event raising money for a club on campus. James lost his primary in May to Alabama governor Kay Ivey.
In one ad, which ran May 2022, James accused Ivey of spending “$2 million of our tax dollars to create the first transgender public school in the South.” Requests for comment through James’ campaign and his personal Facebook account were not returned.
The school received its charter in November 2020 and opened its doors to students in fall 2021. Charter schools in Alabama receive state funding. A public document released by the school in the summer of 2022 showed that they received nearly $3.5 million in revenue during the 2022 fiscal year, and $1.5 million came from “state sources.”
“Enough of this foolishness,” James said in a separate ad criticizing the LGBTQ community, which came out in April. While the ad critiqued the academy specifically, it also spoke out against transgender people as a whole.
James’s ad had an immediate effect on the lives of the MCAA community — especially for those whose faces were shown in the ad.
One of the students in the ad was Fasking. They remember first seeing the ad in the car on the way to school. Their first response was to laugh, especially considering that they had gotten used to being “constantly harassed and bullied for stuff like that,” Fasking said.
“It’s really easy to get used to just laughing it off and pretending that it doesn’t matter and doesn’t exist,” they said. “But my mom was livid. She was white-knuckling the steering wheel. Just so, so angry.”
The fear began to set in once they got to school and went to Evans’s history class.
“When I got to school, we were sat down once we got to history class, and he played it on the board, and I remember sitting there watching it with my friends,” Fasking said. “I was smiling before that, and I just remember my face falling, because I realized that my face was in the ad.”
Fasking felt “very, very unsafe all at once.”
Evans, a straight, cisgender man, was also pictured in the ad — doing a drag performance in a dress to a “Princess and The Frog” song.
“I had no reference for being political fodder, and the one time in my life that I did full drag, I somehow got on TV for it,” he said. “I mean, I’m telling you, it was crazy.”
He started feeling anxiety about the effects of the ad, too.
“Now I’m spending half my time in class staring at the window because I’m nervous people are going to drive up. So it did its damage,” Evans said.
Aside from the fear of harassment or even violence from critics of the school, Fasking was upset that the ad turned a happy memory of a school event into one they could no longer look back on fondly.
“That had been a really, really fun day, and I had been having such a nice time,” they said. “Then it was twisted into this weapon for some guy to point at and go, ‘Look at all the weird queer kids.’ And it felt like being back at my old school again, which was not great.”
As the ad began spreading across the state, the academy became subject to more criticism, making the fears of students and faculty come to fruition.
Fasking recalled one time in April — after James’s ads first ran — when they and their friends were filmed while eating lunch outside the school building by a woman wearing all-black and sunglasses. A faculty member chased down the woman, who then drove away.
“There was another time during the middle schoolers’ recess period where a minivan of people apparently drove by and started yelling slurs and mean names at the kids,” Fasking said. “That one makes me really mad. Because already, this entire situation is grown adults bullying children. But to drive a van past a school during a bunch of 12 year olds’ recess periods to yell awful, awful things at them for being who they are? That’s disgusting. That’s horrendous.”
School administrators knew that criticism would come, but it came harder and faster than they originally expected.
“We were kind of glad summer hit, just to kind of let everything calm down,” Evans said.
Although attending the academy brought more scrutiny into their life, Fasking said they still wouldn’t trade their experiences at the school for the world. Being at MCAA was a safe space for them — and for other students who have been previously neglected during their education.
“I didn’t feel regret for a second,” Fasking said. “Never, in that entire situation, did I think I shouldn’t have gone to MCAA.”
Students across the board described how they are able to express themselves at MCAA in ways that were not possible at their old schools.
One student who started at MCAA this fall as a senior, Alyx Combs, said they have always had trouble fitting in, but they’ve been able to find a group of friends — and a girlfriend. Combs said that they feel much more comfortable being in a relationship at MCAA compared to their other school.
Combs also said there is a substantial neurodivergent community at the academy, which makes them feel more comfortable in the classroom.
“I’m happy that there are other people like me in that sense as well,” they said.
Part of what makes MCAA special, Evans said, is that the staff is “honest” about their students and “where they’re coming from.”
“Usually, when you work in the South, you have to feel everybody out and use code words and make sure that everybody’s on the same page,” he said. “But at the academy, we’re like-minded, again, we wouldn’t be there if we weren’t.”
For Wilson, living as a community at the academy most importantly means creating inclusion, not exclusion.
“You know, someday in this world, we’re gonna have to realize that we are all just people,” he said. “We are all put here for the same purpose — that’s to live and survive and be together.”