A Hartford, Conn. school is reviewing complaints over a field trip in which students were terrorized during a slavery re-enactment.
James and Sandra Baker, filed a human rights complaint in March against the Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy after their daughter told them about her experience, reports Hartford’s WFSB.
According to the Baker family, parents were not informed that a slavery re-enactment exercise would be conducted. The field trip, which took place over four days last fall, was part of a field trip to Nature’s Classroom in Charlton, Mass.
The “exercise” aimed to assist the students in having a greater appreciation for slavery by having them act like escaped slaves.
Sandra Baker said her daughter and fellow students were terrorized during the field trip, which included students being chased through the woods by “white masters” played by white instructors, picking cotton, and being cramped in a dark room to demonstrate the Middle Passage.
Some of the language used on students during an exercise included, “Dumb dark-skinned negro person how dare you look at me,” Baker testified.
John Santos, the executive director of Nature’s Classroom, told The Huffington Post that, while he regrets that the Baker’s child had such a negative experience, “we are not in the business of creating harm, physically, or emotionally but the legitimacy of the activity needs to be judged by individual participants at all grade levels.”
The slavery re-enactment is an “activity that has validity, it’s an historical event, it’s a simulation,” Santos said Thursday.
Other school districts have brought similar concerns about the Nature’s Classroom exercise to their school heads. Those schools have removed the program from their curriculum.
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