Teaching is basically a family business for Dr. Bobbie Dodds Glass, so much so that if you traced her family tree, it might look more like a school staff directory. Her four grown children are all teachers, their spouses are all teachers, and somehow, this doesn’t even begin to capture her influence on students, colleagues, and the broader education community. To date there are nearly 9,000 teachers, principals, counselors and central office administrators spread across the world who have spent a minimum of 8 weeks training with Dr. Glass on their way to becoming licensed and certified to work with the most extreme and marginalized students in their school districts. Bobbie’s journey in Special Education started back in 1977, right when P.L. 94-142, what we now know as IDEA, was changing the landscape for students with disabilities nationwide.
Bobbie has taught every grade level from K-12 and every level of higher education from undergrad to doctoral students. She has worked with students who are blind or visually impaired, pioneered the use of assistive technology with funding and support from Apple, IBM, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, and even led a state agency ensuring access to education, healthcare, and more for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. On top of that, she’s a licensed K-12 teacher, a full-time Special Resource Teacher, an advisor for LGBTQ+ programs in schools and medical curriculum, and a devoted mom and grandmother of 10. When she’s not shaping young minds, Bobbie is exploring Kentucky’s back roads, camping, off-roading, or navigating the great outdoors in her RV. She’s an inspiration for educators, families, and adventurers alike.
Monika: Dear Bobbie, before we dive into your impressive teaching experience, I know you’ve been busy with some exciting projects. Can you tell us about the recent documentaries you’ve been involved in?
Monika: Dear Bobbie, before we dive into your impressive teaching experience, I know you’ve been busy with some exciting projects. Can you tell us about the recent documentaries you’ve been involved in?
Bobbie: Yes, indeed. Two of our documentaries are doing quite well right now: 1946 – The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture and Conversion (2024). Both are streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Fandango, and YouTube. The shots of me at the world premiere of 1946 are with the director/producer, Rocky Roggio, and one of the principal figures, Kathy Baldock. Rocky and I also did a podcast together recently, discussing my advocacy work in a deep red Southern state. Conversion is a tell-all exposé on the cruel world of Conversion Therapy.
Monika: Beyond filmmaking, I know you’re heavily involved with the Trevor Project?
Bobbie: Most of my work with the Trevor Project focuses on LGBTQ+ youth mental health and suicide prevention. There are two Trevor Project PSAs running now, but the bulk of our work is being produced for ABC to accompany coverage of the Chiles v. Salazar case currently on the SCOTUS docket. Season One of the Trevor Project’s Sharing Space series, hosted by Daniel Radcliffe, was a hit, and this past summer they hired me to join the cast of Season Two, which we’re still working on. There was also a feature in Le Monde this summer highlighting the advocacy work we’re doing.
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| "I never imagined I’d end up teaching students whose lives had been so destabilized." |
Monika: Your whole family is basically a school of teachers, do family reunions feel like a professional development seminar or more like a comedy show?
Bobbie: Honestly, it’s a little of both, but mostly a comedy show. There’s a kind of gallows humor that only teachers really understand, and when you get that many educators in one room, the stories start flying. Someone will say, “You are not going to believe what happened in my classroom last week,” and everyone already knows they’re about to, because some version of it has happened to all of us. There’s plenty of shop talk, of course, new paperwork requirements, staffing shortages, schedules being rearranged in ways that look good on paper but make no sense in real life.
Monika: So even when you’re laughing, it sounds like the work is still right there in the room with you.
Bobbie: Exactly. The humor is never detached from the kids. Even in the middle of the jokes, the conversation always circles back to the same questions: Did the kids get what they needed? Did we do right by them? What can we do better next time? The comedy is real, but so is the commitment underneath it.
Monika: When you first started teaching after P.L. 94-142 passed, what was the wildest “I didn’t see that coming” moment with your students?
Bobbie: Two moments stand out, both humbling in ways I couldn’t have predicted. My early work was almost entirely with students who were blind or visually impaired, disabilities everyone recognized as legitimate. At the time, I carried some very mistaken assumptions about emerging categories like ADHD. I thought it was a discipline issue or a byproduct of poor parenting. Then I met my first student with profound ADHD, and everything I thought I knew fell apart. Watching a bright, capable child struggle against a neurological reality they couldn’t will themselves out of was sobering.
Monika: That must have been a jolt, realizing the gap between what you’d been taught and what you were seeing.
Monika: That must have been a jolt, realizing the gap between what you’d been taught and what you were seeing.
Bobbie: It was. That moment forced me to unlearn a lot, and it reshaped how I approached every child afterward. The second surprise came as the field began grappling with severe behavior disorders in the 1980s. We were trying to understand how to educate children whose most challenging behaviors weren’t willful, but symptomatic, kids whose nervous systems had been altered by prenatal exposure, trauma, or chronic abuse. There were no easy answers, and in many ways, we were building the plane while flying it.
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| "I missed the classroom more than I expected." |
Bobbie: Yes. I never imagined I’d end up teaching students whose lives had been so destabilized that the courts had to intervene. Those young people, many of them wards of the state, are where my heart lives now. They’re not diagnoses; they’re kids trying to imagine a future while carrying the belief that no one wants them. I didn’t see that coming when I started, but it shaped everything I believe about education and advocacy.
Monika: You were ahead of the curve with assistive technology in the ’80s. Did you ever have a gadget that was more “sci-fi nightmare” than helpful?
Bobbie: Early assistive technology often looked like a sci-fi nightmare, but that’s what innovation looks like before it becomes elegant. In the beginning, you’re stringing things together with alligator clips and duct tape, trying to make devices talk to systems that were never designed for users with significant disabilities. It’s clunky, bulky, and sometimes absurd, but that messiness is part of the process. Back then, we talked a lot about human interface: how real bodies interact with technology.
Monika: Was there a moment when you thought, “Okay, this isn’t pretty, but it’s going to change everything”?
Bobbie: Absolutely. The shift from manual Braille writers to early electronic devices with refreshable Braille displays was revolutionary. Instead of feeding paper through a machine, tiny pins moved under the reader’s fingers, letting text scroll without moving their hands. We eventually got a prototype down to the size of a paperback book, miraculous at the time, even if it cost $12,000.
Monika: And that’s where the infamous Mountain Dew incident comes in?
Bobbie: Yes. One of our programmers who was blind accidentally spilled an entire Mountain Dew into the device. We thought it was a very expensive paperweight. An engineer calmly took it home, soaked it in vodka overnight to flush out the sugar, and brought it back working perfectly. That was the day I learned vodka could be a reimbursable expense in state-funded research. Early tech looked chaotic, but that chaos was creativity at work.
Monika: Switching hats from classroom teacher to Executive Director of a state agency sounds intense. Did you ever miss the chaos of K–12 classrooms?
Bobbie: Intense is the right word, and yes, I missed the classroom more than I expected. Moving into executive leadership, I learned a lot about systems, policy, and how decisions get made. But I also became completely removed from the people I entered the field to serve. My days filled with fundraising, political navigation, and meetings focused on short-term outcomes. It wasn’t where my best work lived.
Monika: So returning to the classroom wasn’t a step back, it was a recalibration?
Bobbie: Exactly. I took a significant pay cut to return to K–12 teaching, and it turned out to be the best decision I could have made. Once I was back with students, my credibility deepened in a different way. Graduate programs began seeking me out, and teaching at the university level became a meaningful part of my life for more than two decades. Leaving politics wasn’t retreat, it was returning to center. The classroom restored my sense of purpose, and everything that followed grew from that.
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| Presenting to a PFLAG group in Owensboro, KY. |
Bobbie: Very carefully, and with a lot of humility. Middle and high school students in particular are navigating adolescence, identity formation, sexuality, gender, belonging, at the same time they are receiving intensive mental health care. That combination demands constant awareness, flexibility, and care. You have to read the room every minute. Some days, the victory is getting a student to pick up a pencil. Other days, it’s helping them imagine a future they’ve never been encouraged to picture for themselves.
Monika: And yet you talk about it with such clarity, almost like you recognized something in yourself there. What made you realize, “This is where I’m meant to be”?
Bobbie: What surprised me was not how difficult the work was, but how clearly it matched my strengths. I discovered that I was most effective with students who felt unwanted, unseen, or written off. In those classrooms, learning isn’t just about academics, it’s about restoring a sense of possibility. It’s about helping a young person believe they are worth the effort, worth the time, worth the hope. That’s the real curriculum.
Monika: So the challenge wasn’t the deterrent, it was the invitation.
Bobbie: Exactly. I didn’t choose those students because the work was easier. I chose them because they asked the most of me, and ultimately taught me the most about what education is really for. The privilege of being trusted during such a vulnerable time in a young person’s life is something I’ve never taken lightly. It shaped not just my teaching, but my understanding of what it means to show up for another human being.
Monika: LGBTQ+ advocacy is such a big part of your work lately. What’s been the most rewarding change you’ve seen in schools or medical curriculum?
Bobbie: The most rewarding change I’ve seen is also the one that makes the loss most visible, because for a while, we genuinely got this right. Early on, some of my advocacy grew out of very practical community work: helping build reliable, real-world resource networks for transgender people so they could actually find competent medical and mental health care. That work eventually connected me to larger institutional efforts, including the opportunity to serve on the advisory team that helped develop one of the nation’s first fully integrated LGBTQ+ medical school curricula at the University of Louisville.
What made that effort powerful was that LGBTQ+ health wasn’t treated as a sidebar, it was embedded across all four years of medical training, woven into how future physicians learned to care for everyone in their communities.
Monika: That kind of integration feels rare even now. What did it change for students, both the LGBTQ+ ones and the future doctors learning to care for them?
Bobbie: It changed everything. At the same time the medical curriculum was evolving, similar progress was happening in public education. Our school district began building thoughtful policies, counselor training, and student supports that recognized LGBTQ+ students as part of the fabric of school life. Gay–Straight Alliances were thriving, educators were better prepared, and students were safer. Louisville became a place where LGBTQ+ people, especially young people, could actually envision a future. That transformation didn’t happen because of one organization or one person; it happened because educators, clinicians, families, and advocates worked together over years to build something humane and sustainable.
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| With Sharon “Rocky” Roggio, producer and director of 1946-The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, at the World Premiere in NYC. |
Monika: And when you look back at that period now, knowing how much has been rolled back, what stays with you the most?
Bobbie: What stays with me is that it worked. The outcomes were better. Students stayed in school. Families stayed together. Care became proactive instead of crisis-driven. In recent years, much of that infrastructure has been deliberately dismantled by state-level legislation. That has been devastating to witness. But even now, the most rewarding change I hold onto is the proof that inclusive systems do save lives, and that they can be built again. My current advocacy is grounded in that knowledge. I’m not imagining a future we’ve never seen; I’m working to restore and protect one we already know is possible.
Monika: Your mom passed before you came out, but do you ever wonder whether she would have embraced you as her daughter? And do you see her in the way you look, move, or even in your style and little mannerisms?
Bobbie: I do wonder, but not in a way that feels painful anymore. My mother was very much a woman of her time and place. We grew up in a small town where appearances mattered, reputation mattered, and certain truths simply weren’t spoken aloud. I don’t think she would have had the language or framework to understand my life as her daughter back then, and I didn’t want to place that burden on her in her later years. So she never knew, not in words. And yet, love has ways of expressing itself that don’t depend on language. As I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed how present she is in me. In the way I care about being put together when I leave the house. In my love of plants and noticing the natural world. In my sense of gratitude, and in the quiet strength it takes to move through spaces that weren’t designed with you in mind.
Monika: It sounds like she shaped you in ways she never got to see. Do you feel her with you now, in the life you’ve built as a woman?
Bobbie: Very much so. She was a woman who learned how to survive, and even succeed, in a world that didn’t fully make room for her. I recognize that inheritance now. I don’t imagine she would have embraced my life in the ways we talk about acceptance today. But I do believe she would recognize the woman I’ve become. And I feel, in a way that’s hard to explain, that she knows me now, more fully than she could have then. I carry her with me, and I hope I’m honoring her by living honestly, with grace, and with courage.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Bobbie Dodds Glass.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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