By Sarah Bahari
A Mesquite elementary school teacher has resigned following an investigation by the school district into racially charged statements she made on social media.
Mesquite ISD began investigating the Thompson Elementary School teacher Monday afternoon after someone tagged the campus in a post, which included some of her comments, district spokeswoman Laura Jobe said.
By Tuesday morning, the teacher resigned, Jobe said. In a statement, the district called the teacher’s comments “alarming” and “racist.”
The teacher could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
The teacher, who is Black, has since deleted her account on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. But screenshots of her posts were still circulating widely on X.
In the posts, the teacher complained about her sister dating a white man and said she had asked her boyfriend to kill him. In others, she used derogatory terms for white people.
“I enjoy being racist,” she wrote in one post. “I’m never changing.”
The teacher, who was not named, has worked for Mesquite ISD for four years, including the past three years at Thompson Elementary. She taught third grade. She also taught for a year at Seabourn Elementary in Mesquite.
Just east of Dallas, Mesquite is among the most diverse suburbs in the region. Roughly 60% of the district’s 38,000 students are Hispanic, 25% are Black, and 10% are white.
Superintendent Angel Rivera said in a statement the teacher will not be eligible to work in the district again.
“The highly offensive statements posted to her X account do not reflect the values and standards of Mesquite ISD, and the district condemns them in the strongest terms,” he wrote.
| This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas- at the bottom. |
