A white teacher in Baltimore was fired after crossing a line with an unruly class of 8th graders. A student filmed her losing her temper and calling her black students “punk a** n*****s” who would be shot as a result of not doing their schoolwork.
Parents of students at Harlem Park Elementary and Middle School are livid after a tape surfaced documenting a white teacher using racial epithets to admonish her students. The video shows her growing increasingly frustrated with an uncooperative student and demanding he leave the class.
She then turned her focus to the rest of the class and berated them for not doing their work and called them “idiots,” and threatened to give them zeros. She then asked the class if they “want to be punk a** n*****s” who are “gonna get shot...because you’re stupid!”
This did little to encourage the class to calm down and focus on their school work. It probably did not help that all the students seen on the recording were black.
Erica Gales Deminds, 32, had a son in the classroom at the time, and he showed her the video. She was shocked to see it as she had known the teacher for a few years and had even met one-on-one with her.
"She's a very nice teacher. I can't say what happened that day. I think she was at a breaking point," Deminds told the New York Daily News.
However, the language in the video still shocked her.
“I see it and I’m floored!” she said. “So I uploaded it and shared it with my family, didn’t think it would go as far as it went.”
The teacher was quickly terminated from Baltimore City Public Schools and released a statement on Thursday affirming their commitment “to creating positive and equitable learning environments in school communities where all members are welcome, supported, and valued.”