A preschool in Florida has come under fire after photos emerged of a two-year-old Black girl participating in a “racially unethical” Rosa Parks role-play.
The young girl was allegedly playing the part of civil rights activist Rosa Parks in an alarming role-play of her 1955 arrest when she refused to give her seat up for a white passenger in the segregated bus.
In the role-play photos, the toddler is placed under arrest and fingerprinted.
The photos of the classroom demonstration were circulated to parents, drawing outrage from the little girl’s guardians. Her parents responded by pulling her out of the Building Brains Academy daycare in Osceola within 30 minutes.
“I can’t believe this is happening to our daughter,” Jay, the girl’s father, told NBC News.
“It was our daughter who had her hands restrained behind her back by another child wearing a police vest,” he said, describing the pictures.
“What I keep relieving in my mind is the look on our daughter’s face.”
The parents decided to take their daughter out of school within half an hour of seeing the photos— (NBC News)
The NAACP, a US civil rights organisation, condemned the reenactment exercise, calling it “racially unethical” in a news release.
"We consider the activity an inappropriate trivialisation of a significant historical event, insensitive to the struggles against segregation, and psychologically harmful to all students involved, especially Black students reenacting such a traumatic moment in American history," the NAACP wrote in a letter to the school.
The organisation asked the school in the letter to cease such activities within their curriculum and requested a formal statement of apology for all those involved in the “distressing incident.”
The letter also implies that the student was handcuffed by a white peer, but a spokesperson for the preschool claimed to NBC News that the student was not white and no restraints of any kind were actually used.
"The photos of the class activity do not offer a complete or accurate representation of the full lesson about the importance of equal rights," Paola Rosado, the preschool’s owner and founder, wrote in a letter in response to the NAACP, the outlet said.
"Our school believes in and teaches the importance of equality, of standing up for our rights, and of speaking up when we see something isn’t right."
Even if restraints were not used, the NAACP said, per the outlet, that the “emotional trauma” from the class activity is “egregious.”
The young student’s mother told the outlet that when they asked the school why role-play occurred, they told her that the “teacher is not from America” and “does not understand the true context behind Rosa Parks.”
The spokesperson told the outlet the teacher has apologised and now understands why the role-play should not have taken place.
“We teach these lessons not to celebrate the wrongdoings of others in the past, but to encourage our children to prevent such actions in the future,” the school said in a statement to The Independent.
“We deeply regret the assumption that our teachers, our leadership, or our administration would in any way choose to make a child feel uncomfortable or negatively singled out.”
The role-play allegedly was a spontaneous activity and is not part of the usual curriculum and Building Brains Academy claimed that they apologised to the parents and to the NAACP, yet the organisation is still seeking a more official apology from the preschool.
The Independent has contacted Building Brains Academy for comment.
