Bronx Teacher Is Fired for Calling Student "Negro;" Says She Was Just Using Spanish Word for "Black"

A Bronx teacher says in a new lawsuit that her language lesson was lost in translation when she was fired for calling a student "Negro" -- though she claims she was simply using the Spanish word for the color "black" at the time -- the New York Post website reports today (May 24, 2013).

The non-tenured junior high instructor, Petrona Smith, 65, was fired from the bilingual PS 211 in March 2012 after a seventh-grader reported the alleged insult. Smith was also accused of calling her students "failures."

Smith -- who is black and a native of the West Indies -- has been unemployed since her ouster.

"They haven't even accounted for how absurd it is for someone who's black to be using a racial slur to a student," said Shaun Reid, Smith's attorney. "Talk about context! There's a lot of things wrong here."