Teacher Fired For Word "Negro:" The 65-Year-Old Bronx Teacher Says It Was A Misunderstanding

A teacher fired for word "negro" because a student complained about the teacher using the word.

Petrona Smith, 65, a teacher in the Bronx was the teacher fired for word "negro." The student also complained that she was called a "failure" and a "negro." The student that told on the teacher was a 7th-grade teacher.

Smith is suing the school for allegedly wrongfully being fired.

The student misunderstood Smith's meaning, according to the Smith, which caused the teacher fired for word "negro." She was using the word "negro," the word for the color black in Spanish, not an outmoded reference to a person of African descent, according to UPI.com.

 "They haven't even accounted for how absurd it is for someone who's black to be using a racial slur to a student," Shaun Reid, Smith's attorney, told the New York Post. "Talk about context! There's a lot of things wrong here."

In court papers, Smith said she was teaching students how to say different colors, and even explained that a black person in Spanish is called "moreno," not "negro," UPI reported.  Smith also said she asked students who had failed a test to move to the back of the class, but said she had never called any of them failures.

Smith also alleged that the students attacked her verbally. They allegedly said "f***ing monkey," "cockroach" and "n****r." Smith said she had always risen above their insults.