Texas teacher under fire for asking student to 'speak English, this is America' when he questioned her taking away his phone in Spanish
EL PASO, TEXAS: The conduct of a high school teacher is under investigation after she made a "racist" remark in reply to a student who asked a question in Spanish. Socorro High School in El Paso has come under fire after the video of a substitute teacher telling a student to “speak English” because they were in "America" went viral online.
It is unclear exactly when the incident took place but it all started when student Carlos Cobian, a junior at the school, whipped out his cell phone in the middle of a class to watch a soccer game between Argentina and Uruguay after observing his peers using phones inside the room.
Cobian later told KVIA-TV that the unidentified teacher walked up to his desk and told him to hand over his device. Confused that none of his other classmates were being asked to do so, he asked her “Por qué?” — which means "why" in Spanish. At his question, the teacher replied, “Speak English. We’re in America" - a statement recorded by one of the other students present in the classroom.
“I was shocked and then I got a little mad,” Cobian told the outlet. “I thought it was a little racist because you know we live on the border … For her to come to teach at Socorro, being a sub, like 90 percent of the students here are Mexicans and Latinos.”
The teacher called the school security and alleged that Cobian had pushed her, which he denied and was subsequently backed by his friends who witnessed the incident. Cobian was escorted out of the classroom.
“She actually tried to say that I pushed her, but I didn't and some of the videos come out [show]that I didn't really push her,” Cobian said.
Daniel Escobar, the chief communications director of the Socorro Independent School District told NBC News in a statement that the school was looking into the matter. “Appropriate action, per our employee code of conduct policies, will be taken,” he wrote.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, which identifies itself as the largest and oldest Latino organization in the United States, called for the substitute teacher to be “permanently disqualified from instructing students following racist remarks.”
“Teachers and all school staff are meant to be leaders and mentors to our children — not racists who harbor anti-immigrant sentiments,” Domingo Garcia, LULAC national president, said in a statement.
“From 1918 until the Texas Bilingual Act in 1969, Texas laws banned Spanish in public schools and many of us remember personally that this was enforced with humiliating corporal punishment in schools.”