Gwinnett County parents and activists have blasted the school district’s response following reports that students at a Norcross elementary school received a math worksheet that used examples of slavery in word problems.
School district officials said the principal at Beaver Ridge Elementary School will personally work with teachers to come up with more appropriate lessons and will offer more opportunities for staff development following the uproar created by the worksheet that included questions such as the following: “Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?” and “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?”
That didn’t go far enough for some parents at the school, where a majority of the students are minorities. They called for an apology and diversity training for the teachers and district officials.
“That’s how people learn from one another and that’s how we all grow,” said Jennifer Falk, a community activist who recently had two children graduate from Gwinnett high schools. “Intentionally or not, this was inappropriate.”
School district officials said teachers were attempting to incorporate history into their third-grade math lessons.
“Clearly, they did not do as good of a job as they should have done,” district spokeswoman Sloan Roach said.
Roach said the school’s principal, Jose DeJesus, was collecting the assignments so they wouldn’t be circulated. She said the teachers were not intentionally trying to offend the students with the questions.
“It was just a poorly written question,” Roach said.
Under district policy, the worksheet should have been reviewed before being handed out to students, but that process was not followed in this situation. District officials said they would work with math teachers to come up with more appropriate questions.
Roach said she wasn’t sure whether Beaver Ridge teachers and staffers had diversity training recently, but she said DeJesus would be open to meeting with parents who had any further questions about the assignments. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the school or district would issue an apology.
Falk said the district needed to do much more to make things right.
“I think the teachers should be reprimanded for using that poor judgment, and an apology should be made,” she said. “But the bigger question is how could something like this happen?”
Parents told Channel 2 Action News, a reporting partner of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that they were shocked that the assignment was dispersed to their children.
“It kind of blew me away,” Christopher Braxton, the father of a Beaver Ridge student, told Channel 2. “I was furious. ... Something like this shouldn’t be embedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade.”
The most recent accountability report for Beaver Ridge, which has an enrollment of about 1,200 students, shows that 62 percent of the students are Hispanic or Latino, 24 percent are black or African-American, and 5 percent are white, with 87 percent of the students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. The school was recently recognized as a Georgia Title I Distinguished School for achieving adequate yearly progress for six straight years.
About the Author
