Ex-Chicago Teacher Sues, Claims Book Led to Firing

A former teacher is suing the Chicago public school district for more than $300,000, claiming administrators fired him in 2009 after a parent took issue with his memoir, entitled “Gabriel’s Fire,” which recounts his own relationship with a teacher in his youth.

The parent had broached what the suit dismisses as a baseless concern about a relationship between her daughter and the Spanish teacher, Luis Aguilera. It says the mother’s anxiety appeared directly linked to the content of the book.

Aguilera’s memoir is about his coming of age on Chicago’s South Side, where at 13, he “began an affair with one of the teachers at the local elementary school,” according to a description of the book on website of the publisher, The University of Chicago Press.

The lawsuit – filed last week in U.S. District Court in Chicago – names Chicago Public Schools and seeks damages, including for alleged discrimination and the violation of Aguilera’s free-speech rights. It also requests an order reinstating Aguilera as a teacher.

“This is an issue of free speech,” Aguilera’s Chicago attorney, Deidre Baumann, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “He was retaliated against and treated differently because of the parent’s clear dislike of the book … that colored everything else.”

A spokesman for Chicago Public Schools, Frank Shuftan, said in an email that officials at the nation’s third largest school district could not comment because it’s a pending legal matter.

The library at the school where Aguilera worked, the Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, acquired the book sometime after it was published in 2000, according to the lawsuit. It wasn’t clear how the parent got hold of a copy herself.

By January of 2009, months before Aguilera’s firing, the librarian was allegedly told by a school official to deny students access to copies of “Gabriel’s Fire,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims an official report before Aguilera’s firing alleged unspecified, “inappropriate” comments by him to the student. While she declined to discuss specifics of the alleged comments, his attorney said Aguilera neither said nor did anything inappropriate.