Watch: Teacher Talks About Being Fired After Speaking Out Against School Board Banning of Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus Song 'Rainbowland'

A Wisconsin school teacher disagreed with the school board banning her students from singing a Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus song, "Rainbowland," which celebrates diversity – and got fired for expressing her opinion, according to Entertainment Weekly.

"The school board of Waukesha, Wis. voted unanimously (unanimously!), 9-0, to terminate elementary school teacher Melissa Tempel," EW detailed.

After the school officials refused last March to allow Tempel's students to sing the Parton/Cyrus song, the teacher took to Twitter to express her disappointment.

"My first graders were so excited to sing Rainbowland for our spring concert," Tempel tweeted, "But it has been vetoed by our administration."

"When will it end?" Tempel wondered.

The teacher included the song's lyrics in her tweet. The words declare, "I know if we try we could really make a difference in this world."

"Wouldn't it be nice to live in paradise / Where we're free to be exactly who we are?" the lyrics continue.

Conservatives have claimed for years that their voices are stifled on campuses. But a recent tactic adopted by the hard right labels school teachers who attempt to make inclusivity part of the classroom environment as "being divisive," and the school district that fired Tempel has a "controversial issues policy," CNN noted.

"Were you told specifically what the controversial issue or issues were in this song?" CNN asked Tempel in a July 15 interview.

"The statement that was made at the hearing was that it was because Miley Cyrus is not appropriate for first graders," Tempel responded, "because if they Googled her they might find something inappropriate."

The CNN anchor, attempting to make sense of the claim, restated that the problem wasn't that the onetime star of the Disney Channel's "Hannah Montana" herself would be performing, but that, "because she [Cyrus] is tied to the song, and as first graders, they might do a Google search – that's what controversial."

"That's what we were told," Tempel responded. "Yes."

"Do you think this was really about the song?" Tempel was asked, to which she offered the opinion that it was "about the policy, the controversial content policy... that was put into place in our district," and went on to note that "there were so many different things that they were telling us we couldn't do anymore." Among them: "We weren't allowed to have signs up that said 'anti-racist classroom.' We weren't allowed to have rainbows.... and the policy was so vague that we didn't really know what 'controversial' meant."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that Tempel "isn't the first educator to face consequences under the district's 'controversial issues' policy. In 2021, Summit View Elementary special education kindergarten teacher Sarah Whaley was suspended after refusing to take down a LGBTQ pride flag in her classroom."

The Guardian reported that at Tempel's July 12 hearing, district superintendent James Sebert – who recommended in May that Tempel be fired – told the room that he thought Tempel "deliberately brought negative attention to the school district because she disagreed with the decision as opposed to following protocol and procedure" – the irony being that Tempel's firing elevated the story from local news to national prominence.

The Waukesha School District issued a statement that claimed Tempel's firing "was not about any particular song... but the process by which an employee goes about expressing their concerns," evidently referring to Tempel's tweet, which The Guardian reported "violated district policy because she did not speak to her supervisors first."

"Tempel and her advocates, meanwhile, have maintained that she was exercising her constitutionally protected right to free speech but was punished because the song in question references rainbows, a key symbol of the LGBTQ+," The Guardian added.

The article continued, saying that while school "officials have declined to say why they considered Rainbowland to be controversial" – and despite a ban on rainbows in classrooms in the school district – "Rainbowland" was replaced with a different song in the first graders' performance: "Rainbow Connection."

Watch Tempel's CNN appearance below.