A Texas teacher who was fired after asking President Donald Trump to remove undocumented students from her school in a series of public tweets that she thought were private messages to Trump, has won an appeal to keep her job.
The firing of Georgia Clark was not justified or supported by evidence and should not be upheld, independent examiner Robert Prather wrote in his decision, according to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.
Clark, who taught English at Amon Carter-Riverside High School, did not sign away her free-speech rights in her contract with the school district and did not violate its policies, Prather wrote.
Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.
The board of the Fort Worth Independent School District voted unanimously to terminate Clark’s contract in June, less than a week after she was suspended over the tweets.
The district said it has the ability to request another hearing on the matter.
“It appears the commissioner may have ruled the way he did based on a technicality, and we are exploring all of our options,” Barbara Griffith, a school district spokeswoman, told NBC News Tuesday. “We are in the process of reviewing the entire analysis.”
Superintendent Kent P. Scribner said in a statement that the district stood by its decision because “we firmly believe this is in the best interests of all students.”
In May, Clark said in a series of tweets addressed to Trump that the school she worked at had been “taken over” by “illegal students from Mexico” and that the president was elected “on the promise that a wall would be built to protect our borders.”
Her account was deleted in late May and she was placed on administrative leave after the school district became aware of her tweets. Clark told investigators she was unaware the tweets were public and thought she was sending direct messages to the president.
Almost 35 percent of the Fort Worth population identified as Hispanic or Latino in 2018. The Hispanic student population in Fort Worth Independent School District is nearly 63 percent. About 87 percent of the students Clark had been teaching are Hispanic, according to 2018-2019 data.
Clark has been investigated in the past. She was suspended in 2013 after she allegedly referred to a group of students as “Little Mexico” and one student as “white bread,” according to district records obtained by NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.
