Black Education / Schools : Black Teacher Fired For Word 'Negro'

MsInterpret

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Apr 21, 2007
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Black teacher fired for word 'negro'
By NY Post -
A Bronx teacher says her language lesson was lost in translation when she was fired for calling a student "Negro" — though she claims she was simply using the Spanish word for the color "black" at the time, according to a new lawsuit.
The non-tenured junior high instructor, Petrona Smith, 65, was booted from the bilingual PS 211 in March 2012 after a seventh-grader reported the alleged insult.
Smith, who is black and a native of the West Indies, has been unemployed since her ouster.
"They haven't even accounted for how absurd it is for someone who's black to be using a racial slur to a student," said Shaun Reid, Smith's attorney. "Talk about context! There's a lot of things wrong here."
The instructor took a hiatus from teaching special education in 2005 to learn Spanish in South America, because she was passionate about learning the language in a cultural context, Reid said.
Smith was also accused of calling her students "failures."
But in court papers she claims that second insult was also a misinterpretation.
Smith had allegedly asked students who had failed a test to move to the back of the room, but says she never called them failures.
She denied calling the student a "Negro," and explained to investigators that she was teaching a lesson about how to say different colors in Spanish and said the word "negro," which is Spanish for the color black. She told her students that it was not a derogatory term and that the Spanish word for a black person was "moreno."


Read more: http://www.myfoxny.com/story/22417647/black-teacher-fired-for-word-negro#ixzz2UG6EBnrn
 

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