Fort Worth teacher wins appeal after firing over anti-immigrant tweets to Trump
DALLAS _ A Fort Worth ISD teacher fired this year after she tweeted anti-immigrant sentiments to President Donald Trump should be allowed to have her job back, the state's education commissioner ruled Monday.
Mike Morath, commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, said that Georgia Clark should be reinstated, with back pay and benefits, or be paid one year of salary instead.
Morath wrote that Clark did not sign away her free-speech rights in her contract with the Fort Worth ISD, and that the district failed to properly challenge the findings of an independent examiner who said Clark should not be fired.
The district has the ability to request another hearing on the matter.
"It appears the commissioner ruled the way he did based on a technicality and we are exploring all of our options," Barbara Griffith, a Fort Worth ISD spokeswoman, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The school district's board voted unanimously in June to fire Clark, an English language-arts teacher at Carter-Riverside High School, "for good cause" after learning about the tweets.
The since-deleted Twitter account, @Rebecca1939, sent a flurry of messages at Trump this spring.
One of the messages claims that the Fort Worth district is "loaded" with students illegally in the country from Mexico and that "Carter-Riverside High School has been taken over by them."
_The Dallas Morning News
