I am pretty sure most people at McCallum already know this.

In addition to being a kind of folksy and gregarious digital media teacher, he also runs many of the clubs for people at the school who may not have up until very recently been included in the societal norm. I asked him about all of the things that he does to help out with students in the LGBT community as well as people who do not self identify with the gender binary, and he replied very humbly about his role, saying, “All I do for them is try to create a safe space.”

He told me the story about how on one occasion when a student had called someone else a faggot that he had discouraged further use of the pejorative and wrote a Facebook post about the whole experience.

Many of Bjerke’s former students chimed in to say that when they were students here that his classroom was their safe space.

One of the clubs that Bjerke hosts, Spectrum, was set up so that LGBT students and their straight friends could address and resolve some of the issues and problems that LGBT students encounter on campus as a consequence of the stigma placed on them.

The club includes straight people as well as everyone else, which Bjerke believes is the way it should be.

“It’s a spectrum, so you can call yourself whatever you want to be, but it’s completely irrelevant, and in the future it will be,” Bjerke said. “Once everybody in the school knows four or five trans kids, they’re going to change the way they view them.”

Bjerke believes that the environment now is much better than it was than it was when he was growing up.

“I didn’t even know what [being LGBT] was,” Bjerke said. “In a small town, the only exposure I ever had to gay people was the PRIDE parades, and I always saw them and the way they were, and I thought that that wasn’t who I was. My freshman year of college, I was a raging homophobe. I said horrible things about people, and then *BAM* I realized I was those people.”

You can join Spectrum by going to Mr. Bjerke’s room (153) on Wednesdays during lunch.