A Southern California middle-school student was discriminated against when he was ordered by a teacher to visit his school’s nurse’s office after coughing on a sip of water, Gloria Allred, his high-powered attorney, said.
Dylan Muriano, an 8th-grade student at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, said he was unfairly treated even though he assured his teacher that he was fine.
Muriano asked why he was being singled out and not non-Asian students, CBS Los Angeles reported. He claimed the teacher then started to retaliate against him.
“I was just going to let it go and just move on,” he said. “But I thought to myself, ‘What if the teacher does it again, or does it to another student in the future?”
Leyna Nguyen, his mother and former local news anchor, told reporters that she just wants an apology.
“What kind of message does that send to my son and what kind of message does that send to every other student sitting in that classroom? That it’s okay to discriminate and single someone out because of their ethnicity,” she asked, according to ABC 7.
A complaint was filed against the Los Angeles Unified School District and the boy’s school. Allred said a top school administrator initially “reacted with appropriate outrage”
The LAUSD did not comment in media reports.
Allred said school officials told the mom that they couldn’t do much as far as disciplining the teacher and asked her to consider yanking the boy from the classroom.”