Vallejo Teacher Allegedly Asks Latina Student About Leaving Country After Trump Win
VALLEJO (CBS SF) -- The mother of a Latina high school student in Vallejo said she will work to have one of her teachers removed after remarks he allegedly made to her daughter about leaving the country, a day after the election of Donald Trump as President.
The 14-year-old freshman student at Jesse Bethel High School in Vallejo told Univision 14 San Francisco her physical education teacher came up to her Wednesday in front of six witnesses to ask if she had her plane tickets.
"He came up to me and said, 'Did you get your plane tickets? Because you are going to leave,'" the student told Univision 14. "I said, 'Who says I'm going? I'm not going anywhere."
Five minutes later, she said the teacher returned to apologize, but all the while he was laughing.
"My daughters were born here," the child's mother told Univision 14. "My daughters do not need to listen to that."
The mother said she has already filed a formal complaint to the Vallejo City Unified School District.
"These are teachers. It's assumed these are teachers who have been trained and have been credentialed," the student's mother said. "They do not need to be talking in this manner to the students."
The student also told Univisionn 14 the teacher had mentioned previously that he would vote for Trump and reiterated that the teacher had been speaking in that context when he made the remarks to her.
"I understood correctly," she said. "I wanted to cry when he told me that, but I was scared."
A spokeswoman for the Vallejo City Unified School District gave Univision 14 a statement, saying the district expects all its employees to be responsible in respecting the diversity in the district, and it was unfortunate the incident occurred. The statement also said the district was handling the incident in the appropriate manner.
The child's mother told Univision 14 that while the school has placed her daughter in another P.E. class, she would do whatever is necessary to see to it that the teacher would be removed from any position within the district.