Three years after Georgia Clark was fired, Fort Worth schools face another racist incident
Three years after the Fort Worth school district Board of Trustees fired a teacher for making anti-immigrant statements on Twitter, the board is again weighing whether to dismiss a teacher involved in a racist incident.
District Superintendent Kent Scribner is recommending the board fire a Paschal High School teacher who failed to stop a student from delivering a class presentation in which the student repeated the N-word several times. A video of the presentation surfaced online earlier this month.
The incident occurred a little over a year after a Texas appeals court upheld the 2019 termination of Fort Worth teacher Georgia Clark after she made anti-immigrant statements on Twitter. An employment law expert says the Paschal teacher’s case may not be as straightforward as Clark’s, but the district likely has the law on its side.
Video depicts retelling of Shakespeare, featuring N-word
The Paschal video shows a student presenting what appears to be a reinterpretation of “Romeo and Juliet,” apparently resetting the play during the days of American slavery. During the presentation, the student repeats the N-word several times as some of his classmates laugh and others exclaim in surprise.
Before the beginning of the presentation, the teacher tells the class that “the point is not to be offensive. It’s his interpretation.” Before launching into the presentation, the student warns classmates to leave the room if they get offended easily.
The presentation lasts for nearly three minutes, during which time the teacher makes no move to stop the student.
The district has not confirmed the teacher’s name.
Claudia Garibay, a spokeswoman for the district, wouldn’t give information specific to the teacher. Typically, employees are placed on administrative leave pending an investigation, she said. Three students at Paschal told the Star-Telegram that the teacher didn’t return to school last week.
The Star-Telegram submitted an open records request Tuesday for the teacher’s employment records. That request is pending.
Steven Poole, executive director of United Educators Association, declined to comment on the case. Typically, the association gets involved if one of its members is fired or threatened with termination, Poole said. He wouldn’t say whether the Paschal teacher was a member.
It’s unclear when the school board might vote on the recommendation to fire the teacher. The board next meets in a special session on May 17 but the agenda is not yet online.
Former teacher asked Trump to ‘remove the illegals from Fort Worth’
In 2019, Clark, then an English teacher at Carter-Riverside High School, tweeted at President Donald Trump, asking for a federal crackdown on undocumented students at her school
“I do not know what to do. Anything you can do to remove the illegals from Fort Worth would be greatly appreciated,” she tweeted. “Georgia Clark is my real name.”
Clark also included two phone numbers where she could be reached. She later told a district investigator that she thought her tweets were private messages to Trump, not public posts viewable by all.
The board voted unanimously to place Clark on leave, then fired her in September 2019. Clark appealed her termination to the Texas Education Agency. Two months later, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath ruled that the district had fired Clark wrongly and that she should get her job back, along with back pay from the time when her contract was not renewed. The district appealed that ruling, and in March 2021, the 250th District Court of Travis County upheld the board’s decision to fire Clark.
Paschal teacher’s case could prove more complex
Michael Z. Green, director of the workplace law program at the Texas A&M University School of Law, said if the Paschal teacher’s case ends up in court, it could be more challenging than Clark’s case because the teacher wasn’t the one making offensive statements. Still, he said the incident directly involved the teacher’s duties as an employee of the district.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects students from discrimination based on race in educational settings. That protection includes ensuring that school classrooms don’t become a racially hostile environment, he said, something the Paschal teacher arguably failed to do when she didn’t stop the student from repeatedly using a racial slur.
In Clark’s case, even though the behavior at issue happened outside of the classroom, it’s difficult to see how Clark could come back to school and conduct class in an appropriate way after having made such statements, Green said. In that instance, the balance comes down on the side of the district as an employer disciplining one of its employees, he said.
Paschal case could raise First Amendment questions
There’s also the question of how far the Paschal teacher, as an agent of the state, is allowed to go in policing student speech, he said. That question is even more complicated, he said.
In the landmark 1969 First Amendment decision Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the court held that neither teachers nor students shed their First Amendment rights when they arrived at school. Schools must show that student speech “materially and substantially interferes” with school operations to justify suppressing that speech. In that case, five students were suspended from school in Des Moines for wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court again took up the question of how much control schools have over student speech in a case involving a high school cheerleader in Pennsylvania. The student posted a photo to Snapchat expressing frustration at not having been selected for her school’s varsity cheerleading squad. In the post, the girl, Brandi Levy, and a friend hold up middle fingers. In a caption, Levy wrote “(expletive) school (expletive) softball (expletive) cheer (expletive) everything.” After becoming aware of the post, Levy’s school suspended her from the cheerleading squad.
The court sided with Levy and her parents, holding that while schools have some interest in policing student speech off campus, the school violated her First Amendment rights when it suspended her from the team.
But Green said the fact that the Paschal incident happened in a classroom and not off campus gives the school — and, by extension, the teacher — more leeway to suppress the student’s speech. Other students in the classroom have a right to a learning space that isn’t hostile, he said, and anyone should understand the racial hostility generated when someone uses the N-word. While they’re in the classroom, those students are a captive audience in a way they aren’t when they’re perusing Snapchat.
“This is not someone who was just on social media, and you don’t have to listen to what they say on social media,” he said. “You’re in that classroom, you can’t leave the classroom.”
Last month, the court heard arguments in yet another case involving a school district’s ability to suppress speech, this time involving a former assistant high school football coach in Bremerton, Washington, a small town 17 miles west of Seattle. The coach claims he lost his job because he wanted to kneel in private prayer on the football field after games. But the coach’s attorneys acknowledge he went further than that, sometimes leading players in locker room prayers and other times inviting supporters and lawmakers on to the field to pray with him.
Green said he expects there will be more high-level cases testing schools’ ability to police the speech of teachers and students in the coming years, especially as more states, including Texas, pass legislation limiting how teachers are allowed to discuss American history with regard to race.
