A press conference was held on Wednesday (April 5) to call out a Houston teacher who reportedly singled out her only Black student during inappropriate lessons on slavery. Tori Ards was joined by several community leaders after her daughter informed her of ongoing racially charged interactions.

Ards first learned of her daughter’s troubles last Thursday (March 30). The child claimed her history teacher at Kahla Middle School in Houston glamorized the Confederate flag, telling the class it had “nothing to do with slavery” and “history got it wrong.” Ards contacted the principal who apologized and assured the concerned parent that it would not happen again, local news station ABC 13 said in an article published on Wednesday.

Only it reportedly did. Days later. On Monday (April 3), the girl claimed her teacher took things up a notch. The instructor was accused of using the Black minor as an example of an enslaved person on the run. This time, the child’s mother had enough. On Wednesday, Ards was joined by activists Quanell X with New Black Panther Nation, Candice Matthews with the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats and Sledge Leonidas with the Houston Caribbean Professionals Association. X claimed the teacher “went on to further intimidate this young woman by using the analogy with her daughter about how she could be captured and how the teacher could take her to the South and sell her. She’s singling out this young Black student as an example of a slave auction, a slave capture and a sale.”

He continued, “We have teachers, who are racists and bigots in the classrooms, in charge of the responsibility of shaping and developing young minds and want to rewrite history to desensitize slavery, human bondage, lynching and deprivation of Black people in America and here in the South.” The Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District has since placed the Houston teacher on leave and opened an investigation. “We stand in solidarity with this family. We do not condone this, and we are not complicit. You [the teacher] don’t need to be nowhere in nobody’s classroom with those types of ideologies. Absolutely not. We put our foot down on white supremacy. We put our foot down on trying to damage our children,” Matthews added.