Report: Principal of Oklahoma elementary school moonlights as drag queen, was previously arrested on child porn charge

A principal at an elementary school in Oklahoma is a locally known drag queen and was also once accused of possessing child pornography, new reports claim.

According to a Substack article from V1SUT, Dr. Shane Murnan, the 52-year-old principal of John Glenn Elementary School in southwestern Oklahoma City, has moonlighted as a drag queen named Shantel Mandalay for nearly two decades. Mandalay is well known in local drag queen circles and was even recently crowned this year's Miss Oklahoma FFI, a pageant for drag queens.

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.

The following is a recording of "Ms. Shantel" participating in a virtual drag queen story hour sponsored by the Metropolitan Library System. In the clip, Mandalay reads a book called "Be Who You Are."