Norcross parents upset by slavery in school math worksheet

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.

Deu 28:50- A nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor shew favour to the young:

2 Esdras 2:22- Keep the old and young within thy walls