West Village School Axes Segregation Plan After Parent Outrage

WEST VILLAGE, NY — The Little Red School House is nixing plans to segregate students by race at the elite private school after furious parents complained, the New York Post reported.

Recently, parents — who pay a whopping $45,485 per year to send their children — learned of Director Philip Kassen's plans to place minority middle-school students in the same homerooms next fall. Parents were also horrified to learn that the policy wasn't new and was implemented in the 2017-18 school year for two middle school grades, the newspaper reported.

“My daughter who is 11 was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy. They are talking about separating by color,’” one father told The Post. “And I was thinking how antiquated is this? This is backwards. It’s almost like segregation now.”

Each grade in the school is made up of 40 students with two homerooms — classmates stick with their homerooms for 30 percent of the day, the newspaper reported.

In a letter, Kassen noted that the initiative was meant “to better support our students of color" and developed "after much conversation with the faculty and was prompted by a conversation with a number of recent graduates, reflecting on their experience at LREI and suggesting that we create greater opportunities for connection and support.”

The president of Manhattan Private School Advisors, Amanda Uhry, told the Post she has fielded numerous complaints from irate parents slamming the Little Red School House's policy.

“How could a school possibly do that? I don’t know if I would necessarily send a child to a school that separated by race,” Uhry told the Post. “1964, remember that? We had segregation in America. What is this? It’s segregation.”

The school will not implement the policy this fall, but said it will keep "race as a critical, but not primary, determinant" for student placement going forward.

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