Private School Under Fire For Trying To Separate Students By Race

The Little Red School House located in the West Village, NYC had a lot of explaining to do last month after parents discovered how their children were being grouped in 7th and 8th-grade classes for the 2017-2018 school year. Reported by The New York Post, the school has been organizing children by race as far back as 2016.

Within the last month, parents at the $45,485-per-year private school were shocked to learn that the race-based placement policy had already been in effect for the 2017-18 school year for 7th and 8th graders and would likely be expanded to the 6th grade in September.

Each grade, which has approximately 40 students, has two homerooms and students remain with their homeroom groups for 30 percent of the school day.

Knowing this information did not make the parents happy.

“My daughter who is 11 was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy. They are talking about separating by color,’” one father, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.

“And I was thinking how antiquated is this? This is backwards. It’s almost like segregation now.”

Parents claim the school has a history of racial bias and this plays a heavy hand in class placement. One mother said, “for three years all but one of the 10 non-white students in her child’s grade were assigned to the same class in lower school.”

Another father, whose daughter recently graduated from the middle school, said classes have been segregated for as long as she was enrolled there and was conspicuously in effect during the 2016-17 year.

“They weren’t very open about it,” said the grad’s father, whose daughter was in what he referred to as the “minority class.”

“It was my daughter who immediately noticed that all the kids of color were in one class. If you’re going to have that policy, you need to be upfront,” he said.

The grad’s father said the divisions were obvious as far back as kindergarten.

“We realized she was placed with all the minority students, but none of her friends. It was peculiar that they didn’t spread everyone out.”

In 2016, when he voiced his concerns to other parents, they refused to believe that the school would section off kids according to race in this day and age.