FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — An anonymous user posted a viral video of a teacher interrupting Muslim students’ prayer at Franklin Academy Charter School in Pembroke Pines on Wednesday night.
By 2 p.m. the next day, the school had announced that the teacher was “no longer a member of the Franklin Academy staff.”
In the video, a group of boys begins to pray on mats laid out in what appears to be a teacher’s office. A few seconds into the video, she enters the room.
“Hold on, this is my office,” the teacher says. “And y’all doing this magic?”
The students continue to pray. At one point, the teacher says, “I believe in Jesus, so I’m interrupting the floor” and steps over them.
As of Friday afternoon, the video had garnered over 5 million views and thousands of comments, most of them asking for the teacher to be fired.
“Yesterday, a very troubling TikTok video was shared with our leadership team,” Franklin Academy said in a statement Friday. “Upon receipt of the video, organizational and school leadership began immediately investigating the situation.”
The incident also got the attention of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR-Florida, which said it “welcomed the firing of a teacher who allegedly engaged in hate speech targeting Muslim students performing prayer at school.”
The teacher herself has not been identified. The person who posted the video also has remained anonymous, but claims to be one of the students involved.
“I literally don’t even believe what happened to me is real,” the caption reads.
Later on Thursday, the person posted an update.
“UPDATE: She got fired,” the comment reads. “Thank you to everyone who called or tried to help at all.”
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