A private $45,000-a-year New York City school has abandoned plans to segregate students by race after testing the project with seventh- and eighth-graders this past school year, NBC's "Today" show said Monday.
The Little Red Schoolhouse in the city's West Village, said it had planned to segregate students by race in all of its middle school homeroom classes for the upcoming school year, the New York Post reported.
But "Today" reported Monday that director Philip Kassen has now scrapped the plans after receiving considerable backlash from parents and others. He had said, according to the morning show, that students spent about 30 percent of their time in their homerooms.
"We are committed to supporting all of our students in order for them to have the most enriching school experience possible," the school said in a statement to "Today."
"Today" said the school was going back to its old policy that made race a "critical, but not primary" determinant in homeroom placement.
The Post said that the school tends to celebrity children, like those of actor David Schwimmer, movie director Sofia Coppola, and model Christy Turlington Burns. The school had said the move to segregate homerooms was created out of conversations with recent graduates who claimed that the school could "create great opportunities for connection and support" for minority students, the Post wrote.
Kassen informed parents recently that that all the minority middle-school students would be placed in the same homerooms come fall, according to the Post.
He reportedly pointed to the school's handbook that states: "Research points to the academic, social, and emotional benefits to being in a classroom with others who share racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or cultural backgrounds," the Post wrote.
The Post said that some parents, though, revolted at the idea, according to Amanda Uhry, president of the Manhattan Private School Advisors.
"How could a school possibly do that? I don’t know if I would necessarily send a child to a school that separated by race," Amanda Uhry, president of Manhattan Private School Advisors, told the Post.
She added "1964, remember that? We had segregation in America. What is this? It's segregation."
Another private school adviser, Victoria Goldman, author of "The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools," told the Post that the controversy "will most likely affect admissions" at the 97-year-old institution.
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