RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In the days after a Richmond middle school teacher was suspended for telling a student to stop speaking her native language in class, a Richmond advocacy group has spoken up about years of discrimination facing Spanish-speaking students in local schools.
A controversial audio clip published by a local Hispanic radio station last week captured a Boushall Middle School teacher telling a sixth grade student to stop speaking Spanish in her classroom.
During the conversation, the teacher is heard telling the student “go back to wherever that Spanish-speaking country is and speak it” and “when you in America you gonna speak English in the classes that are spoken here.”
The audio prompted outrage from the community, including from a local advocacy group.
“I was absolutely appalled,” Jenny Aghomo, vice president of the Richmond Region League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) said.
Aghomo said she spoke with the student from the audio and was told that the student was asking her friend a question in Spanish.
“Never did the child ever say anything disrespectful, never did the child say anything against the teacher,” Aghomo said “In fact she was very upset that she had disrespected her,”
During this week’s school board meeting, LULAC — along with the student’s mother — brought these concerns to the board and asked for the teacher’s behavior to be addressed.
A statement from Richmond Public Schools (RPS) Chief Wellness Officer Renesha Parks stated that the teacher was placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation.
But Aghomo says that the issue goes much deeper than this one teacher. The number of Hispanic students has increased to 44% of the student body in recent years and 38% of Boushall Middle School students are English learners. But in the aftermath of the classroom audio, LULAC has received numerous reports from families who say this a district-wide issue.
“We’ve had a number of families come forward and say ‘this has been happening to my child, this thing has been happening to my child and I just don’t know what to do, I have no one to talk to,’” Aghomo said.
While Richmond Schools’ policies and student code forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion and gender, there is no clear policy on which languages can and cannot be spoken in the classroom.
8News asked whether Richmond teachers are required to take some form of training on language use in the classroom, but recieved no answer.
While Aghomo is not sure what the school division’s path forward should be, she says she is glad that this incident that brought years of discrimination to light.
“We want to see cultural orientation training in the schools, we want to see it made mandatory,” Aghomo said. “I don’t have all the answers but I do know something has to change and maybe it has to start with this teacher.”
