Florida Teacher Suspended Over Donald Trump Final Exam Question
A Donald Trump-related final exam question that officials deemed wholly inappropriate got a Palm Beach Lakes High School teacher suspended today.
The multiple choice question in question read as follows:
If Donald Trump becomes president of the United states, we are:
- Screwed
- Screwed
- Screwed
- Screwed behind a really YUGE wall that Mexico pays for.
Malik Leigh, an attorney who teaches (or perhaps taught) legal studies at the Florida high school, told the Palm Beach Post that “I’m not pushing a political agenda. To me, it was a funny question.”
He has been banned from the campus pending an investigation.
The Donald Trump question actually never reached the students’ desks because the exam required pre-approval by administrators, which evidently it didn’t get.
“Another question would have asked students whether the best technique for attorneys making an opening statement during a trial would be to wink at the judge, focus on the hottest juror, talk to jurors like friends, or ‘treat them like the MORONS they are.'”
Leigh denied that any of his exam questions were inappropriate, according to ABC West Palm Beach affiliate WPBF. “If anyone gets offended, well, you kinda had to be there. You’re just upset you weren’t in on the joke,” he explained.
A final-exam question about Donald Trump got this teacher suspended: Florida public school teacher… https://t.co/UDfAOxP33z #JobCircle
— JobCircle.com (@JobCircle) May 20, 2016
Principal Cheryl McKeever apparently determined otherwise, describing the test as “wholly inappropriate for the Law Academy Class. Specifically, the exam materials contain inaccurate content, irrelevant material, unprofessional use of language, inappropriate use of language, and contain content outside of and not consistent with the curriculum for the Law Academy.”
A significant footnote in this controversy is that Leigh previously filed a lawsuit against the Palm Beach County School District in connection with the high school declining to extend his teaching contract and that of many of his colleagues. “The suit alleges that the school did not renew his and about 30 other teachers’ contracts in retaliation for a perceived lack of loyalty to administrators. Notably, Leigh stood by five students who revealed to the school board that they didn’t have a full-time math teacher,” Business Insider reported.
https://twitter.com/DonaldTrumpHub/status/733453983679807488
Superintendent Robert Avossa declared that the Trump question was “an absolute no-no. We send out information to our teachers regularly about staying away from individual political parties.”
Parenthetically, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago lavish estate/private club happens to be located in nearby Palm Beach.
This week, the GOP presumptive nominee got some good news in polling data from Fox News and Rasmussen which shows him making gains against his chief rival. In the former survey, Trump leads Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton by a margin of 45 percent to 42 percent although both candidates have high unfavorables. Rasmussen found that Trump has a five-point lead over Clinton, 42 percent to 37 percent. It remains to be seen if these polls are outliers, given that they run counter to the conventional wisdom about the November election.
In a separate development, last Sunday, the New York Times published a detailed story about Trump’s alleged pattern of unsettling behavior with women. One of the women prominently featured in the story described the account as completely misleading, and even many media pundits who are hardly predisposed to be in Trump’s corner claimed that the would-be exposé fell flat.
Prof. Camille Paglia, a contrarian feminist and Bernie Sanders supporter, called out the Times in her Salon column.
“On Monday, after seeing countless exultant references to this virtuoso takedown, I finally read the article—and laughed out loud throughout. Can there be any finer demonstration of the insularity and mediocrity of today’s Manhattan prestige media? Wow, millionaire workaholic Donald Trump chased young, beautiful, willing women and liked to boast about it. Jail him now! Meanwhile, the New York Times remains mute about Bill Clinton’s long record of crude groping and grosser assaults—not one example of which could be found to taint Trump. Blame for this fiasco falls squarely upon the New York Times editors who delegated to two far too young journalists…The hidden agenda of advocacy journalism has rarely been caught so red-handed…”
Do you think the Donald Trump final exam question was offensive?
[Photo by Mel Evans/AP]
