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PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- More than a year after she allowed her kindergarten students to vote an autistic boy out of class, a St. Lucie County teacher returned to work Nov. 19.
Wendy Portillo has been moved from Morningside Elementary School to Allapattah Flats K-8, where she now teaches sixth grade.
St. Lucie County school board members unanimously approved her reinstatement last week.
But not everyone is pleased with the decision.
"I had grave concerns about her being in the school," parent Pam Kastelnik told WPBF 25 News.
In May 2008, Portillo asked her Morningside Elementary School class to vote on whether Alex Barton (pictured) should be allowed to stay. He lost the vote, 14-2.
Alex has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a type of autism.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From WPBF-TV:
