Mother says school district retaliated after she complained about 'Black only' classes
The federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating an Atlanta school district after a parent said she was retaliated against for pointing out that a school was segregating Black students, The Daily Beast reported.
Kila Posey, whose child attends Mary Lin Elementary School, requested that her second-grade daughter with “individual educational needs" be in a specific teacher's homeroom class, but she was told by school principal Sharon Briscoe, who is Black, that the teacher they preferred did not teach a "Black class," according to The Beast.
Posey and her husband claim that Briscoe then tried to persuade them to put their daughter in one of the "Black classes."
The federal department began looking into the case in November of last year.
As The Beast points out, the investigation has now expanded into whether Posey was retaliated against for blowing the whistle. "Posey, who is Black, started a daycare service in 2018 that partnered with Atlantic Public Schools, according to a retaliation complaint filed last August. However, she claims she lost the deal in 2022 after her initial complaint about racial segregation," The Beast's report states.
A lawsuit she now filed says that she began to lose contracts with schools in the Atlanta Public School district and Mary Lin dumped her program and went with another without notifying her.
Posey had meetings with the NAACP and the school district about her concerns last year, but less than "two hours after the NAACP representatives left, Principal Briscoe terminated Mary Lin’s contract with The Club…for unspecified reasons,” according to the suit.
Read the full report over at The Daily Beast.