Teacher fired for giving students zero in assignments they didn’t submit

A teacher in Port St. Lucie, Florida says that she was fired for refusing to give students zero in assignments they refused to turn in to her.

According to WCMH, after many students didn’t hand in an Explorer Notebook project, Diana Tirado, an eighth-grade history teacher at West Gate, gave them a zero for a grade.

According to Tirado, she was let go because of the school’s no-zero policy, allegedly included in the student and parent handbook.

But what if they don’t turn it in, and they say we’ll give them a 50. Oh no we don’t, Tirado told WCMH.

Tirado, who was still in her probationary period, was terminated from her position on Sept. 14. However, no clause was mentioned in the letter from the principal.

According to WFTV, a chief information officer for West Gate said in a statement:

There is no district or individual school policy prohibiting teachers from recording a grade of zero for work not turned in. The district’s uniform grading system utilizes letter grades A-F, numerical grades 100 to zero and grade point averages from four to zero.

Tirado claims she was told never to give a student a zero.

I’m so upset, because we have a nation of kids that are expecting to get paid and live their life just for showing up, and it’s not real, the teacher said.

On Tirado’s last day, she wrote a message on her whiteboard to the students and posted it on Facebook.