Teacher Fired For Giving Kids Zeroes

Was the school right?

If you missed it on the Wakin' Up with CJ and Jess Show, we got talking about the teacher in Florida that was allegedly fired for not giving students a minimum grade of a 50 after some kids didn't do their assignments.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, 52 year old teacher, Diane Tirado has been a teacher for almost 20 years and started to work this year as an eighth grade social studies teacher in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

To start the school year, one of her first assignments for her class was for them to make "explorer's notebook." She gave the class two weeks to complete the assignment but when it came time to turn in the work some of the students didn't turn anything in so Diane gave them zeroes as a grade and earlier this month, she got fired for it.

Why? I guess the school has a policy that says the lowest grade a teacher can give a student is 50% and when Tirado was asked how she felt about the policy she said, "If there's nothing to grade, how can I give somebody a 50%?"

The school released a statement about the firing and said that they are standing by her being fired and that this was part of a pattern of her being, "defiant" and she wasn't just fired over the grades.

Once we talked about all of this on the show this morning we started getting messages about schools here in the Hudson Valley having similar policies.

We received a message on the WOlf Facebook page that said the Spackenkill School District allegedly has changed a students grades from a 64 to a 65 so that the student would pass instead of fail.

Do you know of any schools in the Hudson Valley that have policies like this? Call the show at 845-473-9431 or leave us a comment on Facebook.