Summary: A teacher who cannot speak Spanish is suing the school board for not hiring her to teach Spanish to kids.
An incompetent Florida woman is suing the Miami-Dade County School Board for not hiring her to teach children Spanish.
Tracy Rosner, a non-Spanish speaker, applied for an elementary language arts position that would have required her to speak Spanish for one hour each day. Although she lacked that bilingual competency, she felt that she was denied the job because of her race, not because she was completely unqualified.
According to her legal team, Rosner thought that another instructor could take over that one-hour of Spanish for her, but the school board disagreed.
The position was a part of the Extended Foreign Language program, a track that gives kids the chance to learn another language besides English. The job required teachers to speak Spanish since they were going to teach students the language.
Rosner, who is white, filed a lawsuit against the school board, claiming 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 lawsuit also said that non-Spanish speakers were a minority in the county and that two-thirds of the population are Latino or Hispanic. Thus, she equated her lack of language skills to “employment discrimination on the basis of race and national origin.” It is unclear whether or not she was informed that white people often could speak Spanish and/or other non-English languages.
Rosner had been teaching at Coral Reef Elementary for ten years before she requested the new language arts position.
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Source: The Guardian
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