A San Francisco teacher has been suspended for singling out and discriminating against her white male students.
Lowell High School teacher Nicole Noel Henares allegedly made the white male students in her English class stand “as a group” and answer whether they “felt like a minority” last fall, according to a letter from the San Francisco Unified School District to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which was obtained by Fox News.
Students felt “confused, sad and that there was no correct answer for them in that moment,” they told the district in interviews, the letter from the district said.
They said that Henares’ actions were not at all related to the content of the class at the moment.
Students also confirmed that Henares has used inappropriate materials in her class, including the Lil Nas X song “Montero/Call Me By Your Name,” which has “sexually explicit lyrics and themes,” the district’s letter said.
Some of the lyrics to the song are, “I wanna sell what you’re buying / I wanna feel on your a** in Hawaii / I want that jet lag from f***ing and flying.”
Henares admitted to singling out her white male students out of “frustration and anger” in investigatory interviews in October and November, the letter said. She claimed that the white male students were “dominating the conversation” in class that day, but none of her students corroborated that claim.
Henares denied ever including the Little Nas X song in her class. However, she uploaded the music video for the song to her Google classroom in two separate places in August, and multiple students confirmed she had included it in class, the district’s letter said.
“Additionally, Ms. Henares admitted that she had not taught any discussion norms to provide a safe space to discuss the sometimes sensitive topics she attempted to,” the letter said.
After the incident, a parent filed a complaint.
The San Francisco school district placed Henares on paid administrative leave that began September 15 and launched an investigation. Then on December 12, the school district gave Henares a 15-day unpaid suspension that ran from December 13 to January 12.
Henares has worked for the San Francisco district since October 2020. Her LinkedIn page still lists her as employed by the district.
In recent years, parents across the country have pushed back on public school teachers and districts for delving into what they say are inappropriate racial or sexual themes.
Earlier this month, dozens of Muslim and Christian parents showed up at a Maryland school board meeting to protest a new policy that would stop letting parents opt their children out of reading LGBT books in school.
Some states have taken legal and regulatory action to prevent public schools from exposing children to such content.
In April, Florida banned teaching gender identity and sexual orientation to any grade from kindergarten to 12th in public schools. Gender identity content in particular has become a hot-button issue for many parents, especially as the rate of trans-identifying children has increased. Florida has also restricted how schools can teach about race in order to block Critical Race Theory from making its way into curriculum content.
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