An Ohio teacher has been suspended without pay and faces possible dismissal after his racist comments to a student.
Gil Voigt, a white science teacher at Fairfield Freshman School, has been accused of telling an African American male student, “We do not need another black president,” after the student expressed that he would like to be president.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the incident occurred on Dec. 3 with other students present, according to papers filed by Assistant Superintendent Roger Martin, who conducted a disciplinary hearing on the matter.
This isn’t Voigt’s first infraction. He received a verbal warning for making an in appropriate racial comment in 2008 and in addition to a verbal warning for improper use of school technology in that same year.
It sounds like this teacher needs to go. If you received a warning for racially insensitive comments before and it’s happening again, you clearly haven’t learned your lesson. What’s sad is that there are probably more incidences of comments like these from him that just haven’t been reported. Comments like that are not isolated occurrences, but indicators of a larger pattern of thinking.