Speak Spanish? US teacher can’t, but sues after not hired

A Florida teacher who speaks no Spanish is suing her employer for discrimination, after the school rejected her for a job that required teaching an hour of Spanish per day.

Third grade teacher Tracy Rosner filed a federal employment discrimination lawsuit against the Miami-Dade County School Board, claiming that her race — white — prevented her from getting the job.

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 NonHispanic 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 MiamiDade 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."

The Miami-Dade County School Board did not respond to AFP's request for comment.