A Spanish teacher who can’t speak Spanish?
Frank Cerabino
Finally, somebody in South Florida is taking a stand for the lingually disabled.
We’ve suffered in silence too long, mangling memorized phrases such as “Hable, usted, más despacio, por favor,” every time some Spanish-speaking person talks at conversational speed.
Now we have a hero. Her name is Tracy Rosner. She’s a schoolteacher in Miami-Dade County. But I prefer to think of her as a white, monolingual Rosa Parks who doesn’t want to go to the back of the ... whatever the Spanish word is for “bus.”
Rosner filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the Miami-Dade County School Board this month because she was passed over as a Spanish teacher just because she doesn’t speak Spanish. I know. It’s an outrage. Her lawsuit claims: “Ms. Ros- ner is a reading teacher at Coral Reef Elementary School and was otherwise fully qualified for the position. However, because of her race and national origin as a non-Hispanic individual who was not a fluent and native Spanish-speaker, Ms. Rosner was denied a position as a Reading/ Language Arts teacher with the EFL program.”
The EFL program is the Extended Foreign Language track that offers students an hour a day of Spanish speaking, writing and grammar. And due to some outlandish discriminatory policy, the school has required that those who teach Spanish ought to be fluent in the language themselves.
Rosner has been a teacher in the school’s college preparatory track, and she applied for the bilingual track, figuring that her principal could just assign some other Spanish-speaking teacher to take the hour a day of Spanish instruction for her students. But instead, she was not considered for the job because of her language handicap.
“Ms. Christina Guerra, the principal of Coral Reef Elementary School, denied Ms. Rosner’s request for reassign- ment on the basis of her race and national origin based on Ms. Guerra’s policy that the EFL Reading/Language Arts Teacher at Coral Reef Elementary School must be fluent and proficient in the Spanish language in order to teach the Spanish component of the EFL Reading/Language Arts program,” the lawsuit says.
Well, that’s not fair. After all, it’s not as if Rosner could actually help her career move by learning Spanish. Her race and national origin prevent her from being fluent in Spanish.