Our Bad: School Apologizes After Teacher Conducts Mock Slave Auction

Via Liz Dwyer at Good.is is a story of a Norfolk, Virginia elementary school teacher who earlier this month turned her classroom into a slave auction during class--dividing her students, along racial lines, into slaves and slave masters:

Jessica Boyle, a fourth grade teacher at Sewells Point Elementary School in Norfolk chose to teach a lesson on the Civil War by turning her classroom into a slave auction. Boyle segregated her students—black and mixed race students on one side of the room, and white students on the other. The teacher then had the white students, all around ten years old, play the role of slave master and take turns purchasing their black and biracial peers.

The incident came to light after parents, understandably, complained. The school's principal, Mary B. Wrushen, sent a letter home stating that although Boyle's "actions were well intended to meet the instructional objectives, the activity presented was inappropriate for the students." Wrushen said the lesson was not supported by the school or district and acknowledged that it "could have been thought through more carefully, as to not offend her students or put them in an uncomfortable situation."

Read the full story at the Washington Post.

This week, the school apologized to parents for the incident. The principal observed that "The lesson could have been thought through more carefully, as to not offend her students or put them in an uncomfortable situation."

In a letter sent to parents, the principal wrote, "Although her actions were well intended to meet the instructional objectives, the activity presented was inappropriate for the students."

Via WVEC: