FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The private school in South Florida that recently fired an employee over posts related to the Israel-Hamas war released a statement on Friday after the former employee talked about her ordeal.
The Pine Crest School reported terminating an employee on Nov. 19 after social media posts that were “hateful and incendiary” to a degree that the school “will never” tolerate.
Maha Almasri said she was the employee and the platform was Instagram. She said she worked as a math tutor and the account was personal.
“The purpose of my post wasn’t to offend anyone,” said Almasri, who is Palestinian American. She said she wanted “just to shed light on the humanitarian crisis happening in Gaza.”
In the statement, the school reported that she refused to remove the posts even though she knew these “were causing significant fear and disruption among students and parents” and allegedly then decided to post even “more inflammatory content.”
Almasri said that wasn’t her intention.
“A couple of my posts were taken completely out of context,” Almasri said. “The interpretation of them was completely not true.”
One of the posts was a graphic that disputed the ongoing war had not started with the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 but in 1948 with the Arab–Israeli War.
Almasri said she was terminated over “disruption to the community.” She disagrees.
“I don’t believe they were disruptive to the community. They were disagreeable to some people within the community,” Almasri said.
Ultimately, the situation also hurt her 15-year-old child who was ousted from the school. She said she didn’t understand why and her “heart dropped” when she found out.
“Punishing me, apparently was not enough,” Almasri said. “Why they felt the need to go that extra step? I don’t know.”
The school reported the situation “impacted the eligibility of her child to continue as a student at the school.”
There is an ongoing public petition asking the private school to reinstate Almasri’s child. The school’s stance: Almasri’s “actions violated the employee handbook and the school’s enrollment agreement.”