A civil rights organization is calling for change after an Upstate New York school district had students play former enslaved people in a lesson about sharecropping.
The New York Civil Liberties Union is expressing serious concerns about a class simulation in September 2025 in the Le Roy Central School District that required students to roleplay as “former slaves,” the organization wrote in a letter sent to the district on Feb. 9.
The lesson took place in an eighth-grade classroom and required students, including at least one Black child, to roleplay as former enslaved people and pay pretzels to their teacher, the “plantation owner,” during a history lesson about sharecropping during the Reconstruction era, the Democrat & Chronicle reported…