Oakland County Teacher Placed On Leave After Giving An Assignment That Placed Barack Obama Beside Monkeys

I’m saying, what’s wrong with people? It’s the audacity because who in their RIGHT mind would depict forever president Barack Obama alongside monkeys?

Well, an Oakland county teacher did just that. The blatant racism didn’t go unnoticed, though. The Roeper School leadership acknowledged the racial offense, saying it was caught after the assignment was given to its upper school class last week.

Carolyn Lett, the school’s director of diversity, said the worksheet was given on May 11, and the morning after, the school received a letter from a parent who was disturbed by the content of the assignment.

“The following morning, we were alerted that this went out, we discussed it ourselves and immediately spoke with the teacher,” said Lett, who has worked at the school for 29 years. “This is not anything we’ve seen before and nothing we’re used to.”

The worksheet went out to two introduction to biology classes, which was about 30 students. It was incorporated into a 130-page lesson plan that came from Duke University, titled, “Apes, monkeys, and lemurs, an introduction to primates.”

“It was a mistake and all the more surprising since we’ve been committed to training our staff,” said Clay Thomas, school board chair with three daughters at the school. “It comes as a great shock to our entire community, especially considering our history.”

School leadership did apologize, saying the curriculum was “completely inconsistent with our school’s philosophy and mission. The teacher has taken responsibility and admitted the mistake of not properly vetting the resource. She has been placed on administrative leave.”

Roeper has lower school and administrative offices in Bloomfield Hills and a middle and upper school in Birmingham. Leadership added that the school was founded in 1941 by George and Annemarie Roeper, who fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution. They established the school to educate children to become thoughtful, humane adults.

The school also said it is implementing a more thorough review process of its curriculum and continuing professional development for both faculty and staff in areas of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. The development will mainly focus on racial bias and administrators. Counseling and support resources were offered to the students. 

“We will continue to educate our teachers and support our students to prevent something like this from ever happening again,” Thomas said.