BENICIA, Calif. – A California middle school teacher learned a valuable lesson about Black History Month this week: segregation is bad.

The only black teacher at Benicia Unified School District’s Benicia Middle School recently took it upon herself to organize a student assembly for Black History Month, but invited only black students, Fox 2 reports.

The teacher, who was not identified, showed a YouTube video about education and the Civil Rights Movement, and gave students surveys about racial attitudes. District superintendent Janice Adams told the news site the teacher organized the assembly without approval, but it was a well-intentioned effort to talk to students about using racial slurs like the “N” word on campus.

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“It looks like segregation. Certainly does. It was,” Adams told Fox 2. “I understand how it looks and I’m very sorry for that, because that’s not the impression we want to give about our school.”

The teacher “really is a great person and she made a judgment call that wasn’t good,” Adams said. “I do believe her intentions were good. She made a bad decision.”

The teacher told the news site she invited only black students to the assembly because she believed they would be more open to discussing racial issues without their white peers, Fox 2 reports.

Parent and school board trustee Andre Stewart told Fox 2 it’s easy to see why parents called the district to complain about the assembly.

“As a parent I can understand why there’s concern, because kids came home and said, ‘I was shown a movie, I took a survey, and oh and by the way, everybody in the room was also African American like me,’” Stewart said, adding that he believes the teacher’s message still has merit.

“We still have to address the issue of kids. You cannot call each other the ‘N’ word and all these different words,” he said. “Because they have harm. They have a hateful history behind them.”

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Parent Ramonte Robinson said the assembly was obviously “not right, ‘cause you’re going back to the ‘60s with segregation.

“I mean, we’re all equal here,” he said.

Adams said she intends to make sure students are treated that way in the future.

“This is not an issue that impacts just African American students. It impacts our entire school population and that’s the important thing to me,” Adams said. “We want to make sure that every student who comes to school feels valued, respected and treated with respect.”

The Black History Month student assembly at Benicia isn’t the only one drawing criticisms from parents, however.

Parents of students at Illinois’ Danville High School also called administrators to complain about the school’s Black History Month assembly, which featured a short segment on Michael Brown, a black teen killed by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer last August, The News-Gazette reports.

Danville principal Phil “Cox said students read ‘a short, one-paragraph biography’ on Brown that touched on his shooting and the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer in his death,” according to The News-Gazette.

“Then, six students who were on the stage raised their arms in surrender and said, ‘hands up, don’t shoot,’ which has come to symbolize opposition to police mistreatment of minorities.”

After receiving several phone calls from parents about the Michael Brown skit Cox said he relayed their concerns to the teacher who organized the assembly, and he planned to broach the topic with students “just to have a dialogue with them,” Cox told the news site.