Board of Education Chairman Reuben McDaniel is defending his actions regarding North Atlanta High.
In the 2 minute video posted on YouTube, McDaniel said he was not directly involved in the investigation into allegations of institutional racism at the school but did report concerns raised by parents to the Atlanta Public Schools central office. McDaniel is running for reelection and has four opponents: Cynthia Briscoe Brown, Mark Riley, Tom Tidwell and Dave Walker. The election is Tuesday, Nov. 5.
“I was getting a lot of information from parents at North Atlanta High School that they were just unhappy with what was going on there from a racial segregation perspective, where you had different SLCs that were getting a different level of attention,” McDaniel says in the video. “It’s not my job to get inside the school and evaluate whether that’s right or wrong, but it is my job to take that down to the administration and say, ‘A lot of people are concerned about this.’ One of the challenges about racism in our culture today is that we just don’t want to have the real conversations about it. It’s not so much that people are overtly trying to hurt another class or another type of person because they hate them because of their race. It’s really more of a negligence or not understanding of what the sensitivities are.”
Here’s the video, posted Oct. 28.
