Teachers assign slavery math questions

ATLANTA (NBC/WAVY) - Suburban Atlanta school officials are deciding whether to discipline teachers who gave third grade math homework with word problems about slavery.

Third graders at Beaver Ridge Elementary School brought home an assignment that shocked their parents last week.

The idea was to integrate social studies and math lessons resulted in questions like, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?"

Another asked students to figure out how many beatings Frederick Douglass received in a week.

"When I [saw] that question right here, I called my wife from out of the room or whatever and said, look did you see this question? I handed her this homework like look, please take a look at this or whatever, and from there, we were both furious," said parent Chris Braxton.

Sloan Roach with Gwinnett County School said, "There's a lot of those types of assignments that go out that the principal doesn't see, so in this case this was a teacher-developed assignment. This was not done maliciously, there was no intent behind it. These were just not good questions that were asked."

School leaders collected the assignments and say they won't be used again.

The district has opened a human resources investigation into the teachers involved.

The NAACP has called for the firing of nine teachers involved.

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