You may not know it if you judge by most of the things you see here, but I like to think that over all, most human beings are pretty reasonable. Reasonable enough not to…let’s say apply for a job they’re not even remotely qualified to do because it requires a very important skill they don’t possess. Most people, when encountering such a situation, will do one of two things: Either let it go and try to find something else that’s more in their wheelhouse, or take the months or years needed to learn a new thing and then take another run at it. When you’re reasonable, those seem like the only two logical options. But when you’re Floridian third grade teacher Tracy Rosner, there’s a third option. Apply anyway, get turned down, cry racial discrimination and then sue the school board.
After a decade of working at Coral Reef Elementary, Rosner requested last year to teach reading and language arts to students in the Extended Foreign Language (EFL) program, a track that allows students to learn a language other than English for an hour per day.
The school rejected her request because it requires that reading and language arts instructors of the EFL program speak Spanish, said the lawsuit.
Rosner’s lawyers said she was denied the job “because of her race and national origin as a Non-Hispanic individual who was not a fluent and native Spanish-speaker.”
Rosner said the school could have given her the position and had another instructor teach the Spanish component.
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.”
Going by this lawsuit, maybe they should find her an opening in the creative writing department.
