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An Arizona mother is outraged after, she says, her 9-year-old son was singled out and yelled at in class as part of a lesson on segregation in the United States.
Claudia Rodriguez expressed her frustrationin a Facebook poston April 12, writing that her son, a third-grader at BASIS Phoenix Central, was forced to endure verbal abuse from his classmates for the sake of a lesson about the Civil Rights movement.
“His humanities teacher found it wise that in order for the kids to understand what black kids during those times experienced that she would have my child, who is black, walk through the classroom as she, another teacher, and the remaining 27 classmates yell, humiliate and berate him,” she wrote.
She added: “The Head of School had the nerve to tell me that there was some educational value in this incident because it started conversations in the homes of the other kids, AT THE EXPENSE OF MY CHILD’S EMOTIONAL WELL BEING.”
A representative for Rodriguez did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE.
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“The remainder of the class were the protesters who made noise but did not speak words,” Thompson said. Sheadded in another post:
“The students tasked with ‘yelling’ were specifically instructed not to use words, but only to make noise. After the brief exercise, the class came together as a group and discussed what that felt like, how it likely made those heroic students in Little Rock feel, and how it compares to the loving and nurturing experience our students feel each day.”
A BASIS spokesperson, Phil Handler, toldThe Arizona Republicthat Rodriguez’s son volunteered to represent the Little Rock Nine in the lesson. He added that the other students were instructed to not use any insulting remarks during the lesson.
“The characterization that I’ve heard is that the boy was fine, he was not upset and the whole class thought it was a pretty good lesson,” Handler said.
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Meanwhile, Vinita Bhatnagar told theRepublicthat her daughter had a positive experience in the lesson.
“She came home and told me how important it is to treat other people with kindness and not to discriminate,” Bhatnagar said. “She had absolutely nothing negative to say about it. I do not believe that it was out of line in any way.”
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Still, Rodriguez continued in her Facebook post that she doesn’t want other children “to feel what my son felt.”
A spokesperson for BASIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE.
source: people.com
