Dr. Shane Murnan, who is 52 years old, is a well-known drag queen in the local scene. When performing in drag, he goes by the name Shantel Mandalay, a gig he's held for nearly 20 years.
From The Blaze:
Despite his apparently troubling personal life, Murnan began a career in education around the turn of the 21st century. In 2001, when he was 30 years old and teaching fifth grade at Will Rogers Elementary School in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Murnan was arrested and charged with possessing child pornography and drugs.
From his seized digital devices, investigators were able to glean at least four images of pornographic material. However, a judge later determined that prosecutors had not proven that the victims in the images were underage. Though another judge disagreed and stated that the images "do represent child pornography," another court sided with the first judge and dismissed the child porn charge.
In the end, Murnan served a short probation sentence for a marijuana charge and had his record expunged in October 2003. With a newly cleaned record, Murnan adopted the Shantel Mandalay drag persona sometime between 2004 and 2006, V1SUT claimed.
Murnan then spent the next several years cultivating his drag queen career. He began teaching elementary school in Norman, Oklahoma, in 2007 before moving to work as an assistant principal at Prairie Queen Elementary School in Oklahoma City around 2015. In October 2020, while still an assistant principal, Murnan was named a defendant in a criminal probable cause initial filing for an undisclosed alleged offense. The current status of that filing remains unclear.
On June 12 of this year, the school board for Western Heights School District — a district in OKC that was recently controlled by the state on a temporary basis after years of mismanagement — held a meeting to consider several administrative candidates, including Murnan, who was nominated to fill the principal vacancy at John Glenn Elementary School. Though most school board meetings are public, in this instance, board members held a temporary "executive session" to discuss the candidates in private. After about 40 minutes of closed-door deliberations, the board returned to the public meeting room and voted to approve all the administrative nominees, including Murnan.
Thus, the 2023-24 school year is Murnan's first year as principal at John Glenn. His alleged alter ego, Shantel Mandalay, on the other hand, has a long, established presence in the regional drag queen scene. In 2018, Murnan and two other individuals launched Oklahoma City Drag Queen Story Hour Inc. Soon afterward, Shantel Mandalay became a regular drag queen reader for the Metropolitan Library System in OKC.
I'm sorry, but the fact that this person is still allowed to be in schools around young children, let alone be the principal, is pretty unsettling.
In my opinion, drug possession and child pornography accusations should be deal breakers for anyone wanting to work with children.
Honestly, what's going on with the hiring process in this school district?
