A taxpayer-funded high school in North Carolina has come under criticism from local parents because a history teacher gave students a blatantly racist assignment involving a bomb shelter and an impending nuclear war.
The unidentified teacher distributed the assignment at Olympic High School in Charlotte, reports local CBS affiliate WBTV.
The assignment — called “Bomb Shelter Activity” — forces students to use skin color and ethnic background to choose four strangers who will be allowed enter a bomb shelter prior to a nuclear attack.
There’s a “40-year-old Black female doctor who is a lesbian,” for example. There’s a “25-year-old Hispanic male who is a lawyer and is wheelchair bound.”
There’s a “35-year-old white male construction worker who is a racist,” too, notes Greenville NBC affiliate WYFF.
There’s also a “50-year-old White male who is a Catholic Priest” and a “30-year-old Korean-American female who is a former college athlete.”
And, of course, there is a “20-year-old White female who is pregnant, has a two-year-old son and is on welfare.”
A mad dad ignited the furor over the assignment locally when he posted a photo of it on Facebook. He said his son’s history teacher gave out the assignment.
The assignment explains that the president has announced a nuclear war and students are supposed to pretend that their families have access to the bomb shelter. The assignment does not appear to explain why these random people just happen to be hanging around at the time.
On Friday, a spokesman for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District acknowledged that a public school teacher did, in fact, give the “Bomb Shelter Activity” assignment to students.
“The assignment was given in a class as an icebreaker about making decisions,” the spokesman, Brian Hacker, told WBTV. “It has been pulled and will not be given out again.”
Olympic High School is actually a cluster of five smaller schools.
Hacker suggested that the assignment was distributed at the School of Math, Engineering, Technology and Science, which is one of the five smaller schools.
WBTV interviewed a couple of veritable Olympic High parents on the street. Both were unhappy about the assignment.
“Every day more and more of our country is about separation and division,” parent Tom Denton told the CBS affiliate. “And it seems like that’s kind of feeding into that type of thing.”
The second parent, Mia Hatten, suggested that teachers need to focus on the transmission of important and actually useful knowledge.
“That’s just a mess to me,” Hatten told WBTV. “They should be focused on things that matter in school instead of politics.”
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