A high school principal who refused to acknowledge the Holocaust as “a factual, historical event” has been fired by a school district board in Florida.

The Palm Beach County board voted 5-2 to accept the recommendation of the district superintendent, Donald Fennoy, to fire the principal, William Latson, who worked at Spanish River Community High School, according to Julie Houston Trieste, a spokeswoman for the school district.

Mr Latson can appeal the decision, which will take effect on 21 November.

“These are the facts: he is not anti-Semitic; he believes the Holocaust is factual,” Thomas Elfers, Mr Latson’s lawyer, told board members on Wednesday, according to The South Florida Sun Sentinel. Mr Elfers did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Mr Latson had led Spanish River High for 11 years before he was reassigned in July after emails he sent to a student’s parent in April 2018 came to light.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Mr Latson wrote in one of the emails, which were obtained by The Palm Beach Post.

He said he had to separate his personal views about the Holocaust from his job as a public school official.

“I do allow information about the Holocaust to be presented and allow students and parents to make decisions about it accordingly,” he wrote. “I do the same with information about slavery.”

Mr Latson’s comments drew an uproar, particularly among parents and school alumni in South Florida, home to a large Jewish population, including Holocaust survivors.

Thousands of people signed on to a Change.org petition calling for his termination.

School board officials, who said Mr Latson had become “a major distraction”, removed him from his position and reassigned him to an unspecified job.

After the reassignment this summer, Mr Fennoy recommended that the school board not renew his contract, according to a school district spokeswoman.

On Wednesday, in recommending that the principal be terminated, the superintendent said Mr Latson had “failed to respond to communications from his supervisors and failed to assist the district in addressing the serious disruption” from the email and news coverage.

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The Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County, which represents survivors of the Holocaust as well as relatives of those who were killed, voiced its agreement with Mr Latson’s termination Wednesday.

“We are grateful for Superintendent Donald Fennoy’s leadership and commitment to a thorough investigation resulting in this vote by the school board,” Matthew Levin, the group’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“Latson’s abhorrent denial of the Holocaust is unacceptable, and there is no place in our community, and certainly not in our education system, for such unethical ignorance.”