Two Alabama parents are suing a preschool for racial discrimination and retaliation after they say their then 2-year-old — the only Black pupil in his class at the time — kept getting disciplined far more often than other students and was eventually expelled.
In 2021, Lee and Aletta Williamson enrolled their son in Heritage Preschools, a private Christian day care system in Homewood, Alabama, when he was 2 months old, according to a lawsuit filed last month.
The majority-white school takes children as young as 6 weeks old, and they can attend until they’re 6 years old. The Williamsons’ son attended through July 2023, when he was expelled — a move the family considers retaliation for complaining about discrimination.
The family “thought they could trust Heritage to care for and educate their child because Heritage holds itself out as a family-owned school that ‘provide[s] safe, loving, Christ-centered care.’ They were wrong,” according to the complaint.
The Williamsons began noticing issues last May after their child got promoted to the class of a teacher identified in the lawsuit as Caroline Harmon based on his developmental progress, the document says.
The child “hardly ever” got into trouble before May 2023, when he was switched to Harmon’s class, but the lawsuit claims the teacher “immediately began writing up ‘behavior reports’ accusing [the child] of misbehavior.”
The Williamsons received around 30 behavior reports about their son’s behavior within a three-week period, according to the lawsuit, which also accuses Heritage of punishing Black kids for behavior for which its other non-Black students don’t get punished – like “sitting under a desk,” for example.
Harmon’s assistant teacher secretly told the Williamson about the discriminatory discipline, and the parents met with administrators, who placed the child on “the preschool equivalent of probation” for four weeks rather than…
Read the full article here
