At the beginning of the 2018 school year, Florida teacher Diane Tirado was fired for giving the students who had earned a zero (for missing assignments) a zero. (Do people really wonder why our public school system is a mess?)
Tirado has been a teacher for years and most recently, an eighth-grade history teacher at Westgate K-8 School in Port St. Lucie, Florida. After having given her students two weeks to complete an Explorer notebook project, when “several students simply didn’t hand it in”1 she gave them zeros.
And then was promptly fired for it.
The elementary school has a rule called the “no zero policy” meaning the lowest grade a teacher can hand out, including for work that was never done or handed in, is a 50. This is utterly ridiculous.
So when she was fired, she left her students a goodbye message on the whiteboard:
Diane later shared her story on Facebook in the hopes of spreading awareness about the school’s (ridiculous) policy and her story went viral.
“A grade in Mrs. Tirado’s class is earned. I’m so upset because we have a nation of kids that are expecting to get paid and live their life just for showing up and it’s not real.”1
Another teacher, Lynden Dorval, sued a school who fired her for giving our zeros in 2012 and won her case.
We think Diane is amazing and we fully support her!
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