A two-year-old black girl has been subjected to a ‘horrific’ Rosa Parks reenactment involving a lighter-skinned child ‘handcuffing’ her in front of her peers in a Florida preschool classroom.
Civil rights group the NAACP shared shocking photographs of the incident online as it is called on the Florida Department of Children and Families to investigate Building Brains Daycare in Saint Cloud, Osceola County.
In a letter to the department, the NAACP said the black pupil was ‘subject to an alarming act of simulation, where she was handcuffed and fingerprinted by a white peer’ in early December.
The NAACP’s National Director of Education, Dr Ivory Toldson, shared the photographs on Facebook with the pupils’ faces blurred. In unedited versions of the images seen by DailyMail.com, the children appear visibly disturbed and upset.
The toddler’s outraged parents described the lesson as ‘horrific’ and immediately pulled her from the school. The female teacher involved has not been named and continues to work at the daycare.
Building Brains Daycare told DailyMail.com the reenactment was a spontaneous incident rather than a planned part of their curriculum, and that the teacher involved felt ‘horrible’ and has ‘apologized profusely’ to the child’s parents.
They said there were ‘no physical restraints’ in the classroom.
The toddler’s parents, who did not want to be identified, said they first became aware of the incident after seeing the photographs of their daughter through the school app.
‘Her hands (were) restrained behind her back as if she was being taken into custody,’ they told FOX 35.
‘Then the next image was her hands being placed on a table as if she was being booked, and the look on her face alone, it was horrific.’
They added that ‘there’s so many ways to teach the Rosa Parks story’ and that they saw a change in their daughter after the incident.
‘As we were approaching the school where the incident happened, she got very quiet and very, very reserved,’ they said. ‘But then we passed it, we had our daughter back. She was bubbly.’
The NAACP voiced ‘deep concern and profound disappointment regarding the disturbing incident’ which it said would cause the student ‘psychological harm’ by reliving a ‘traumatic moment in American history’.
It also said in the letter it would be ‘exploring all legal avenues to address this grave matter and ensure such incidents are not repeated.’
Hellbound and Down 