Teacher sent on leave after fifth grade students asked to set price for slave

Social studies assignment in Blades Elementary School in Oakville, Missouri has asked the student to imagine themselves as plantation owners and set a price for a slave. Angela Walker whose son got the question paper later shared it. This has lead to a lot of criticism for the school making the principal apologise to the families. 

Attempted to address market practices 

The question originally asked the kids to imagine that they work for the slave trade and then prompted them to set a price for the slave. The question was a part of a set that had 12 questions which asked the students to set prices for various goods. The other questions asked the students to set prices for other goods such as a bushel of grain, a piece of lumber or a jug of milk.  At the end of the exercise, students were asked to reflect on a free market economy and whether they consider themselves wealthy given the money and items they had leftover. Walker, who is a teacher herself, while speaking to the international media said that that there was no value in playing a game about slavery.

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After being backlashed for promoting racism, school principal Jeremy Booker has written a letter which was sent to families at the school on Monday. In the letter, he wrote that as a part of both the Missouri Learning Standards for fifth-grade Social Studies and the fifth-grade Mehlville School District curriculum, students were learning about having goods, needing goods and obtaining goods and how that influenced early settlement in America. The students who participated in this assignment were prompted to consider how plantation owners traded for goods and slaves.

Booker added that he is also working with district leadership to provide all Blades teachers and staff with professional development on cultural bias in the near future. The teacher who made the question paper has been placed on administrative leave. An investigation being conducted by the Mehlville School District.

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