A Texas school board voted Tuesday to terminate the contract of a longtime high school English teacher who went viral after posting Twitter messages last month entreating President Donald Trump to do something about undocumented immigrants at her school.
The Fort Worth Independent School District Board of Trustees voted unanimously to terminate the contract of Georgia Clark, an English teacher at Carter-Riverside High School who joined the school district in 1998, according to The Washington Post.
"Once the tweets came to light, so, too, did other allegations, and it was my professional judgment that it was in the best interest of the district," Superintendent Kent P. Scribner said after the vote, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Clark has 15 days to appeal the decision to the Texas Education Agency, according to KTVT.
In a review by the school district obtained by the Post, officials said Clark didn't realize her tweets were public last month when she reached out to ask Trump "for assistance in reporting illegal immigrants in the FWISD public school system."
“Mr. President,” Clark wrote May 17 in a since-deleted tweet, “Fort Worth Independent School District is loaded with illegal students from Mexico. Carter-Riverside High School has been taken over by them.”
In another tweet, Clark told Trump she needed protections for reporting students who were in the country illegally.
“Texas will not protect whistle blowers,” she wrote. “The Mexicans refuse to honor our flag.”
The Supreme Court in 1982 struck down a Texas statute that allowed school districts to deny public education to undocumented students, determining it to be a right under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, according to the Star-Telegram.
Clark's tweets prompted an investigation and unearthed a history of similar incidents that included disciplinary action in 2013 after Clark called a group of students "little Mexico" and another student "white bread," according to the Post.
The Star-Telegram reported the board recommended her employment be terminated in 2013, but the firing was stopped after a teacher group intervened, according to the newspaper.
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