Teacher suspended, parents angered over 'privilege' quiz

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Photo courtesy Regina Stiles/Facebook

Teaching outside the box has landed a Spanish middle school teacher outside the classroom. Parents are upset their children were given a “privilege” quiz at Monroe Middle School.

The quiz asks students “How privileged are you?”

In order to answer, students had to disclose their gender, sexual orientation, religion and disabilities.

“This is not a district approved form. This is not something that we would collect as a district. We don’t ask students for this kind of information. We don’t collect this kind of information,” said Tanya Arja, spokesperson for Hillsborough County Schools.

The Spanish teacher, Yoselis Ramos, said her goal in giving the quiz, which was not collect for review, was to teach her 7th and 8th grade students about diversity.

“A Spanish teacher doesn’t need to be teaching anything like that. These children, a lot of them, have never even been around anything,” said Dale Cox, in reference to the questions on sexual orientation

Cox said her grandson, a 7th grade student, was given the privilege quiz without her consent. Some of the terms he was asked to identify as, including asexual, pansexual, and transgender, were unfamiliar to him.

“If you’re going to do a class paper, then you do the class paper on the subject of Spanish. Not anything else,” said Cox.

Ramos was dismissed from the classroom pending a review by the Office of Professional Standards. School officials said ultimately the Hillsborough County School Board will decide any further disciplinary action once the investigation is complete.