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Florida teacher was fired after giving zeroes to students who didn’t turn in their assignments

8 0
03.08.2026

If you’re of the mind that kids today are being coddled and not properly prepared for the real world, well, you might want to buckle up for this one. The story out of a public school in Florida has parents and teachers alike up in arms.

A Florida teacher was fired for giving her students zeros for missing assignments. Diane Tirado has been a teacher for years. Most recently, she was an eighth-grade history teacher at Westgate K-8 School in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Diane recently gave her students two weeks to complete an Explorer notebook project, but several students simply didn’t hand it in. Since there was zero work done, Diane gave them zeros.

She got fired for it.

The K-8 school has a rule called the ‘no zero policy’

The lowest possible grade that teachers can give students is a 50, even if they don’t turn anything in. That means that an extremely poorly completed assignment is worth the same number of points as no assignment at all.

Hardly seems fair, right? Westgate is far from the only school that has such a policy, however.

It’s a rule that Diane, unsurprisingly, does not agree with. After she was fired for disobeying, she left her students a charming........

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