White teacher who doesn't speak Spanish sues school because they didn't hire her for Spanish-speaking job

A non-Spanish speaking teacher in Florida is suing the Miami-Dade School Board for employment discrimination after being denied a job that included teaching in Spanish.

Tracy Rosner is suing the school board, the Miami New Times reported, because she says she was discriminated against for being white and not speaking Spanish. The class Rosner wanted to teach is an Extended Foreign Language (EFL) program, in which students are instructed in English for most of the day and then a foreign language for one hour.

Rosner’s lawyer, Matthew Dietz, told Fusion that the Spanish portion of the class can be taught by any teacher, not just the teacher hired for the EFL job, so it may not be technically required of the teacher hired for the position:

This was this principal’s unilateral decision to say that the reading and comprehension teacher is also the teacher for the Spanish program. It could have been any teacher, it could have been the math teacher, it could have been the science teacher, it could have been a teacher from another portion of the school. But for some reason this principal said the English reading and comprehension teacher also needs to teach Spanish … This principal’s one subjective decision that wasn’t based upon school board policy or Florida law or anything, but he just said ‘I want the teacher for reading and comprehension to also teach spanish’.

There’s no connections between these two classes, and because they made the connection between these two classes, my clients couldn’t teach anything other than the class she’s been  teaching for years.

Rosner is a third grade teacher at Coral Reef Elementary in Miami. Her lawsuit argues that because she’s white and doesn’t speak Spanish in the Latino-majority Miami-Dade area, her being denied the job was “employment discrimination on the basis of race and national origin.” 

A spokesperson for Miami-Dade County Public Schools told Fusion they’re unable to comment on pending litigation.