Teacher Suspended for ‘Go Back to Mexico’ Comment: MyFoxDFW.com
Last week I expressed outrage over the Virginia State Legislature’s attempt to do away with continuing contract in favor of 3 year contracts. This story is a good reason why all veteran teachers deserve due process and protection from the politics of a school system.
From the Huffington Post:
Looks like this two-time “Teacher of the Year” will not be in the running to win the esteemed honor this year because of her derogatory comment to a Hispanic student: “Go back to Mexico.”
Instead, 63-year-old Texas math teacher Shirley Bunn is fighting to keep her job.
Bunn made the comment on Sept. 30 while distributing Title 1 forms to her eighth grade students at Barnett Junior High School. Dallas-Fort Worth’s Fox 4 reports that a disruptive student requested a Spanish-language version of the form, saying, “I’m Mexican. I’m Mexican.”
According to public record, Bunn attempted to tell the student that he could retrieve forms translated into Spanish from the main office, but the student continued to repeat “I’m Mexican.”
Bunn quickly responded, “[Then] go back to Mexico.”
The school board placed Bunn on paid leave following the incident, until an Independent Hearing Examiner could review the case.
Late Wednesday, the examiner, Jess Rickman III, recommended that the school board allow Bunn to return to her post. In his 23-page opinion, Rickman determined that the district did not provide sufficient grounds for termination.
“Under the circumstances when taken in the context of the moment and the lack of intent for ‘Go back to Mexico’ to be a racially or nationality-based pejorative remark, I find it was not a remark of an egregious nature,” Rickman said, Fox 4 reports.
Since Rickman’s opinion is just a recommendation, the school board could still reject it and permanently terminate Bunn, who has taught at Barnett since 1999.
“It was almost instantaneous. I thought, ‘God, I don’t believe that came out of my mouth,'” Bunn told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
“It was a very, very hard week, the end of six weeks. It was late in the day. It was a Friday. We were on the third day of the first curriculum assessment and I knew it wasn’t going well. It was just an extremely bad day,” Bunn said.
The school board is expected to decide Bunn’s fate before next month.
Obviously the 2 time Teacher of the Year was at the end of her rope. It sounds life frustration took over when dealing with a disruptive student. Granted, the incident happened in Texas. However, something like that could easily happen here in Virginia if most recourse for teachers and principals is stripped away by the legislature.
Obviously there was a better way to corral the disruptive student. Ms. Bunn freely admits she misspoke. However, at what point do disruptive student incidents like this one get to crater a person’s reputation and career?
Ms. Bunn should be reinstated. Meanwhile, the district is paying an excellent teacher who wants to be in the classroom to collect a pay check for doing nothing. Incidents like this happen every day. Perhaps some of our less than supportive contributors might want to take another glance at the flip side of their own argument.
She should have said ‘then go to Los Angeles’, or ‘then learn English’. At least she wouldn’t be fighting for her job, but that’s the way it goes. The people who are very capable are expected to have no human emotion or breaking point, while those around them can harass them to the end of time without consequence. Both should receive some type of reprimand, but in all likelihood with all the publicity the student’s parents will sue the school and live happily ever after, while the teacher will join the unemployed.
Score: Mexican brat-1, Two time Teacher of the Year-0, and so it goes.
I suppose it doesn’t matter what adverb is put in from of brat…the fact that he is Mexican is irrelevant. We could substitute any any word and the message wouldn’t change.
She was pushed to the breaking point by some brat, yet she is expected to be super human. That much we agree on, SA. And it happens all over Americam, all over Virginia, any day a school is open.
Teachers need some job security and this case illustrates that, in my not so humble opinion.
Ah, you say the fact that he is Mexican has no bering, but I think you are wrong. If he was from Canada, wanting the forms in French, and she said “then go back to Canada” do you really think this would have been handled the same way? I think not. No, the folks from south of the border truly have a hold on this country. We can’t even make them leave if they are here illegally without getting sued by the Feds. That is power, unfortunately, and they’re beginning to take hold of that.
SA, our intention is to breed you all out. We speak about it at our meetings. 🙂
In this case she’s probably going to get canned. I feel for her but I think the idea here that teachers need more job security is misplaced.
I think this is a better example of – like SA said – about how someone that follows the rules all their life gets pushed by a person that doesn’t and probably never will and we instead punish her.
Reminds me of pretty much every gun-control law.
@marin, which means that she needs job protection that contains due process. I am guessing she is on a continuing contract. Why do I think that? She is fighting for her job rather than having been fired. If she wasn’t on a continuing contract, what do you think would have happened? She sure wouldn’t be on leave with pay.
Basically turning a teacher in to a seasonal worker scrubs away professionalism better than Lye soap.
Meanwhile, every teacher has to face a little turd who thinks he can disrupt the class every single day. He or she is lucky if it is only one. Yet some people think teachers are over paid.
I don’t disagree with that part of what SA said. It’s too bad and it happens all the time.
“@marin, which means that she needs job protection that contains due process. I am guessing she is on a continuing contract. Why do I think that? She is fighting for her job rather than having been fired. If she wasn’t on a continuing contract, what do you think would have happened? She sure wouldn’t be on leave with pay.”
Meanwhile I and pretty much anyone else in the private market can be terminated for no reason whatsoever without notice and without any sort of due process. But a member of the public service should – for whatever reason – have more job protection than those that pay his/her salary.
Does not compute.
I am not speaking of anyone but teachers. Let’s keep this specific and not branch off every time I want to discuss something specific.
I am not equating teachers to TSA workers, Federal employees, University grounds workers or anyone else. I am specifically talking about people who have a specific job to do.
Private industry does have protections. That is why they form unions, isn’t it? Why belong to a union if you don’t need one? It costs money. I bet no one at Wegman’s even things of going union. Why? Great working conditions.
“I am not speaking of anyone but teachers. Let’s keep this specific and not branch off every time I want to discuss something specific. ”
No problem.
Teachers are not anything special that deserve anything different than what the average John and Jane Q. Taxpayers get.
Too bad you feel that way. You obviously had none that made a difference in your life. Your loss, I guess. Not everyone feels that way.
Moving from the personal, no one else was under attack during the general assembly that I was aware of. There were several specific bills that I spoke up about that directly affected principals and teachers. I felt this story directly illustrated what can happen and what protections are needed when one deals with kids.
Police have a unique situation also. Do they deserve anything special or is it just teachers who are to be spat upon?
“Too bad you feel that way. You obviously had none that made a difference in your life. Your loss, I guess.”
You’re making an erroneous personal assumption without any factual support. I can (and did) have a great number of teachers that I liked. However, having good/great or bad teachers doesn’t influence me on the subject of giving them a special privilege that I myself lack. This thread has done nothing to influence me to change my mind on this.
“Police have a unique situation also. Do they deserve anything special or is it just teachers who are to be spat upon?”
As indicated in #8 you didn’t want to speak about govt employees generally you wanted to talk about teachers specifically. So, respecting your wishes in #8 I will only speak on this thread about teachers.
@marin, some jobs have more security than others. In this particular case, this woman still has a job because she, in all probability, is on a continuing contract. If she were a rent a teach, which is what doing away continuing contract would be, I expect she would be out on her ear for one screw up. Why? Its cheaper. It has nothing to do with her.
Teachers have a great deal more exposure than folks in other jobs in many respects. Any kid who wants to get his or her own way just has to whine and complain over a case like this one and a teacher of the year is all of a sudden a dirt bag of the year.
MOST jobs don’t have a continuing contract. Continuing contracts are a unique set up for a unique situation. Jobs aren’t one side fits all.
I am glad you had teachers you liked. I am not really sure what special priviledges you see any of them getting. I don’t see any of this as special privilege as much as I see it as a unique danger in a line of work and how employment structure guards against that danger. You can’t drag this application to other lines of work.
This particular story doesn’t apply to all govt employees. In attempting to discuss this in general, the point of the story is lost.
Like I said, to those people who think that being a teacher is like every other job, you are mistaken.
End of story.
Teachers do indeed have a profound effect on your evolving life, and that is precisely why they should not project their religious or political beliefs upon their students. Sorry, off topic, but just another point about teachers in general.
I agree with you SA, they should not project their religious or political beliefs on a captive audience.
I don’t think that her remark should even be a problem.
Obviously Marinm has never been a teacher and appears to not have much regard for teachers who next to parents have much to do with how we turn out. The cooment that folks I. The private sector have no protection–how about EEO and unions? I sometimes think Marinm lines in a narrowly defined world.
@George S. Harris
As indicated in #11 you are in error. Please try again.