Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas filed a complaint Nov. 20 against Talbot Elementary School special education teacher Emily Grace for using a gender-neutral title in their classroom.
The complaint alleges Grace violated state law by asking students to address them as Mx. rather than the “appropriate” title for their sex assigned at birth. It was submitted to the Education Practices Commission, which has the authority to revoke a teacher’s teaching certificate.
“No school teacher can make elementary school kids use fake pronouns in Florida. This isn’t hard,” Kamoutsas posted on X, alongside the complaint.
It follows Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s Oct. 22 letter to district leaders urging them to enforce the law and consider disciplinary action against Grace.
Uthmeier, in response to Kamoutsas’s Nov. 20 X post, thanked the commissioner.
“We enforce our laws here in Florida. There is zero tolerance for teachers who want to play in the pronoun Olympics and force dangerous ideology on our kids,” he wrote on X.
Gov. Ron DeSantis also replied to the commissioner on X, commenting “We are not running the pronoun Olympics in the state of Florida.”
Florida statute prohibits employees in K-12 schools from using preferred personal titles or pronouns that do not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.
District policy requires teachers to follow the statute.
The law went into effect in July 2023 after DeSantis signed HB 1069, which requires sex education programs to teach that sex assigned at birth is “binary” and “unchangeable.”
Critics of HB 1069, including the American Civil Rights Union of Florida, condemned the bill as censorship and LGBTQ erasure.
This marks the second time that Kamoutsas has pursued disciplinary action against an Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) teacher.
He also filed a complaint against Gainesville High School teacher Lauren Watts for giving a student a “Most Likely to be a Dictator” superlative. An investigation found probable cause for disciplinary action. Watts was suspended for one day without pay and put on leave.
APCS leaders have faced repeated scrutiny by Republican state leaders over their speech.
The Florida Department of Education decided to monitor Alachua County School Board (ACSB) meetings through the end of the year, after finding the board violated a parent’s First Amendment Rights at a board meeting in July.
The parent, Jeremy Clepper, was nearly thrown out of the July 31 meeting after calling for then ACSB Chair Sarah Rockwell’s resignation over comments she made about the late WWE star Hulk Hogan.
Less than two months later, state officials reprimanded then board Vice Chair Tina Certain for calling the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk a “31yr old uneducated white boy” in a post she made on her personal Facebook account.
An investigation into Grace’s conduct is ongoing, and they remain on administrative leave, according to a district spokesperson.
This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Florida education chief files complaint against Talbot teacher for Mx. title
Reporting by Chelsea Long, Gainesville Sun / The Gainesville Sun
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
