Sixth Grade Teacher Fired After Asking Questions From ‘White Privilege’ Book

A school district in Hernando County, Florida fired a sixth-grade teacher at Fox Chapel Middle School after she asked her students to fill out a questionnaire from a book titled “Exploring White Privilege.”

Daryl Cox assigned the “How Comfortable Am I” assignment to her leadership class, which, according to a Wednesday report from WFLA-TV, asked students “how comfortable they are with some situations, including ‘You discover that the cute young man/woman that you are attracted to is actually a woman/man,’ ‘Your sister becomes a Buddhist,’ ‘ Your black roommate gets a full-tuition minority scholarship’ and ‘Your mother comes out’ to you.”

Fox Chapel Middle School’s administration started an investigation of Cox after someone made them aware of the controversial nature of many of the questions. She was subsequently let go, as she was still within her probationary period.

The Hernando County school district released a statement which underlined that “in no way, did this assignment meet the standards of appropriate instructional material.”

A Thursday report from WTSP- TV revealed that questionnaire “came from the book ‘Exploring White Privilege’ by author and philosophy professor Robert Amico.”

Amico is a faculty member at St. Bonaventure University in western New York. A 2016 press release from the university pointed out that “though this book is a personal exploration of Amico’s white privilege and how he fought to transcend it, it is couched in a sociological analysis of oppression and privilege that will be useful to anyone embarking on a similar journey.”

[image via screengrab]

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