Florida school bribed Black preteens with fast-food gift cards amid low test scores

Cheryl Massaro, chairperson of the board for Flagler County Schools, admitted that Black students had been “isolated” for an assembly that took place at Bunnell Elementary School.

A Florida elementary school is under fire for reportedly using fast-food gift cards to bribe Black preteens to improve poor test results.

Parents alleged that Black fourth- and fifth-graders at Bunnell Elementary were summoned from class on Friday and instructed to attend the school cafeteria for a school assembly, where high-performing students were called to its front as model examples, Fox 35 News reported.

There, teachers at the school in Bunnell, a small city in the Deltona–Daytona Beach–Ormond Beach area of Florida, discussed students’ test results and allegedly suggested fast-food gift cards as potential incentives for raising their scores. 

Darryl Williams said it made his blood boil when his 10-year-old fifth-grader informed him about the assembly. However, the Flagler County School District assured, in a statement, “there was no malice intended.”

Cheryl Massaro, chairperson of the board for the Flagler County School District, admitted that Black students had been “isolated” for the Bunnell Elementary assembly. She said the gathering should not have occurred, but she acknowledges that “it did.”

Interim Superintendent LaShakia Moore backed the parents’ statements that they didn’t receive advance notice of the assembly. Instead, they learned about it through their children or talking to other parents.

“We want our parents and guardians to actively participate in their children’s educational successes,” Moore said. “Without informing them of this assembly or of the plans to raise these scores, our parents were not properly engaged.”

Moore stated that the school district is still looking into the matter. She swore that moving forward, all its schools will interact with parents in an ongoing attempt to improve students’ academic performance.

“Sometimes, when you try to think ‘outside of the box,’ you forget why the box is there,” Moore said. “While the desire to help this particular subgroup of students is to be commended, how this was done does not meet the expectations we desire among Flagler Schools.”

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