A teacher in Florida is suing the Miami-Dade County School Board for race discrimination after she was turned down for a position in the district’s Extended Foreign Language program because she does not speak a foreign language. ¡Ay! ¡Esta guera es loca!
Tracy Rosner, a non-Spanish-speaking third grade teacher at Coral Reef Elementary in Palmetto Bay, Florida, requested to fill a language arts position that requires teachers to teach one hour of Spanish a day. According to her lawyers, Rosner felt that another instructor could assume responsibilities over the Spanish-teaching portion of the class, while she would focus on reading and writing. The Miami-Dade County School Board did not agree.
After being passed over for the job, Rosner—who is white—filed a federal employment discrimination lawsuit against the board, with her lawyers claiming that she was turned down “because of her race and national origin as a Non-Hispanic individual who was not a fluent and native Spanish-speaker.”
The Guardian reports:
The lawsuit claims that because non-Spanish speakers are in the minority population of Miami-Dade County – where census data shows that about two-thirds of the area’s population are Latino or Hispanic – denying Rosner because she does not speak Spanish amounts to “employment discrimination on the basis of race and national origin.”
Her lawyers told The Miami New Times in a statement that, “The EFL program has a one-hour Spanish component per day that can be taught by any teacher in the program, and not exclusively the English Reading and Comprehension teacher.”
I can’t wait to sue the next job that requires proficiency in Excel when I do not—and WILL NOT—gain proficiency in Excel.