An upstate New York teacher is on administrative leave after telling several of his Black students to put on handcuffs and pick cotton during a slavery lesson in a seventh-grade social studies class.
Rochester school officials are investigating the allegations against Patrick Rausch after students, and their parents raised concerns about the educator’s controversial school lesson, Fox 5 NY reported.
Seventh-grader Jahmiere O’Neal recalled Tuesday being a typical day at the School of Arts during the third period before lunch. The 12-year-old said part of the lesson was about slavery and how cotton was processed.
“He gave the whole class cotton, and we were made to pick out the cotton seeds,” O’Neal said. “He said, ‘Better clean it right, boy.'”
O’Neal explained that the Rausch, white, was teaching in a class of mostly Black and brown students.
“We were all shocked. We were just surprised that he would give us cotton, and we didn’t know what to do,” Jahmiere told WXXI News.
“It made me feel bad to be a Black person,” student Jahmiere O’Neal told news outlets.
Another student, Ja’Nasia Brown, told her mother what happened during class and the outraged parent addressed the situation in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
Precious Tross, the young girl’s mother, took a photo of a piece of cotton that her daughter was given during the school lesson and posted it to her Facebook page. The post garnered more than 500 shares on the social platform.
“My daughter was looking to the floor. She should not have experienced something like that,” Tross told news outlets. “That is a mockery. That is disrespectful. You do not put our kids in any situation like that when you know our history. That hurts me to the core.”
“I don’t have a problem with you teaching our kids about slavery and what our ancestors went through and how they had to deal with that,” she said. “Our teachers back in the day told us that, but they don’t bring cotton and make you pick cotton seeds out of cotton. And you got the audacity to put the instructions on the board for them.”
Teachers union President Adam Urbanski told WXXI-AM that “if someone departs from what they should be doing, they should suffer the consequences, but due process has to be allowed first.”
Tross and Vialma Ramos-O’Neal, O’Neal’s mother, said the teacher did not force white students to take part in the cotton-picking but didn’t give Black students the option to opt-out of the lesson.
“I immediately was like, ‘Oh, I’m not doing that,'” said Brown. “And then he was like, ‘Do it. It’s for a good grade.'”
Moments later, Rausch allegedly brought in handcuffs and shackles for the students to wear as they reenacted the slavery lesson. Tross said the teacher threatened to send her daughter to the principal’s office or school counselor after refusing to put them on.
Both parents call for the school to take disciplinary action against the educator by firing him and revoking his teaching license.
School Principal Kelly Nicastro told parents in a letter that school leaders “take these allegations very seriously,” while the school board called them “extremely troubling.”
According to the outlet, Rausch has a history of incorporating alternative methods as a teacher. At East High School, he led an alternative learning program called Rochester Matters, an interdisciplinary, hands-on curriculum built on experiential learning.
“The premise behind Rochester Matters is that children are most engaged and apt to learn when they can connect the topics and issues they are studying in school to their own life experiences,” Rausch wrote in a guest essay for the Democrat and Chronicle in 2007.
Board President Cynthia Elliott said the teachers should be more mindful with their lesson approach in a district with Black and brown students.
“In a district of Black and brown students, it is important to be sensitive of the historical framework by which our students are engaging and learning,” she said.
