Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

Opinion

Opinion

Standing Up for Immigrants in Your Neighborhood


wethepeople1

We The People


When the President recently reportedly referred to El Salvador, Haiti, and African nations as “s***hole countries,” it once again served as a reminder of the rampant prejudice and discrimination experienced by immigrants and ethnic minorities. And as the livelihoods of 800,000 young Dreamers living in our country hangs in the balance, we need to support immigrants now more than ever.

At Educational Alliance (EA) – the social service provider and network of community centers I lead on the Lower East Side and East Village – we have dedicated much of the past year to ramping up our programs and services for immigrants. The demographics of the Lower East side have changed since EA was founded 128 years ago, but the challenge is the same: immigrants need help adjusting to American life. We believe that our successful “We the People” initiative this past year can serve as a model for the rest of the city.

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, we saw a substantial rise in hate crimes. Here in New York, hate crimes increased by 24% from the previous year, with a major proportion of the rise the result of bias crimes against Muslims and LGBTQ people.

So at EA, we launched We the People as a way of promoting inclusiveness and protection from the hateful and divisive rhetoric targeted at vulnerable populations. We knew that the President’s attacks on immigrant communities would only increase in time, so it was important to show immigrants in our community that there was a safe space they could go to for information and help.

Within a week after taking office, President Trump signed the infamous travel ban, prohibiting travel from seven predominantly-Muslim countries to the United States, sending a clear message that immigrants from Muslim countries don’t belong in our country.

We were ready. Under We the People, we worked with local businesses to identify themselves as welcoming to immigrants, and began training people to be “upstanders,” giving them the tools they need to effectively stand up for justice and intervene in conflict if they witnessed discrimination or attempts to bully our immigrant Muslim brothers and sisters.

Soon after, Trump issued an executive order stating that cities that refused to comply with federal immigration authorities would be ineligible to receive federal grants. And soon after, he rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, placing hundreds of thousands more lives in limbo and in danger of being separated from their family, friends, and colleagues. Though both actions were halted by the courts, the aggressive stance towards immigrants undoubtedly had a chilling effect on their comfort in seeking services or reporting crimes.

But not in our neighborhood. Our partnerships with businesses and other local community groups early on helped spread the word that EA had the community’s back and that this was a place they could turn to for help. Under the initiative, we began to host a series of events, workshops, and community forums, including “Know Your Rights” events where we provide people with access to information on immigration fraud, rights, and legal services.

In the coming year, we will continue this work, investing in programs and services where we can be most impactful and joining together with local residents and businesses to ensure that our community remains safe and supportive for people of all backgrounds.

That’s because regardless of just how divisive and discriminatory our national leaders are towards immigrants and vulnerable communities, we will stand strong – as we have for 128 years – for all people, regardless of race or religious creed.

***
Alan van Capelle is President and CEO of Educational Alliance, a social service provider for the Lower East Side and East Village.

***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

We Must Answer #MeToo with Comprehensive Sexuality Education


sex ed presser ppnyc


As a coalition of health educators, advocates, students, community service providers, and teachers, we know that the stories behind #MeToo are not new. For many of us, it is what led us to this work. Our own stories of assault, harassment, or discrimination, and the stories of the people we love drove us to want to create a better world for the next generation. So that women are not always asked what they were wearing, and so that LGBTQ youth are not told their true self and gender is ‘just a phase’ they’ll grow out of with conversion therapy.

We also know that “Time’s Up” for providing all young people with the tools and information they need to build healthy communities and relationships—and that New York City should be a leader when it comes to sexuality education.

The #MeToo movement has unearthed the extent to which sexual harassment, assault, and the devaluing of women, both cis and trans, pervades our society. No workplace or institution is free from these realities and we are just beginning to take a hard look at the societal systems in place that enable such continued abuse.

This reckoning is long overdue, but we are ready for it.

We are called now to ask ourselves what needs to change. What do we truly want to be different than it was?

Workplace accountability and equal pay, survivor protections to safely report abuse, better representation of women and people of color in positions of power. These are all urgent needs, and yet they don’t fully get to the root of what’s needed for a societal shift to meet the scale of the #MeToo movement.

If we are going to commit to the values of gender equity, trusting women, and enthusiastic consent, it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of learning.

Luckily, we have an unprecedented opportunity in this current moment to invest in that learning. But we need to start from the ground up. We need to teach our young people from an early age how to identify and cultivate healthy relationships, how to ask for and give consent freely, and how to respect and love one’s own body and respect the bodies of others, with sensitivity to people’s backgrounds and experiences different from their own. These are not one-off conversations or hour-long school assemblies. This requires continual skills-building around communication, empathy, and inclusion, and for us to embed these lessons and tools in our educational system from day one through an interdisciplinary approach.

Truly comprehensive sexuality education requires that students learn about safe sexual practices and wellbeing, body autonomy and positivity, consent communication, anti-bullying measures and bystander intervention, where to access trusted confidential health care, how to navigate technology and social media in intimate relationships, and must include lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming students in each topic.

Comprehensive sexual health education also requires that these lessons be taught in all grades K-12, enabling schools to incorporate social and emotional learning skills and core values into the classroom from an early age and start with foundational lessons around respect and positive relationships that allow for more complex and critical discussions to be had later on.

The latest revelations of the #MeToo movement have shown us how ill-equipped we are in our understanding of consent and positive sexual behavior. We need to teach people of all genders how to engage in healthy relationships, and how to ask for consent, rather than putting the burden on one person to shout “no” loudly enough.

We know that comprehensive sex ed works; study after study has shown the positive health and emotional benefits sexuality education provides young people. But right now in New York City, it’s too little too late. According to the Department of Education’s own findings, almost half of last year’s graduated 8th-graders never received a semester of health in middle school, when lessons on sexual health are supposed to be taught. A recent report by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, and the creation of a Mayoral Task Force on sexual health education, highlight the extent to which this issue needs to be urgently addressed in New York.

At Sexuality Education Alliance of New York City, we’ve heard from teachers who have great models for sexual health education at their schools, and we know it’s possible. All students deserve comprehensive, inclusive, and skills-based sexual health education. And they deserve it at every grade and stage of life.

If we’re truly committed to addressing the ways our society enables a culture of discrimination and gender-based violence, and to saying #TimesUp, then we need to commit to large-scale educational change and do our part to honor the people who have come forward to share their stories. This is one of the biggest and most pervasive issues we’re facing today--no investment is too big to build the future we want.

***
Elizabeth Adams is the Co-Chair of the Sexuality Education Alliance of New York City and director of government relations at Planned Parenthood of New York City. On Twitter @ElizaBAdams.

***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Death of Bloomberg-Era School Roils East Harlem


estrella photo gabor

Protesting school closure (photo: Andrea Gabor)


Earlier this month, Kevin Medina, a high-school sophomore, stepped up to the microphone at a crowded public hearing to defend the East Harlem middle school that, he says, changed his life.

“I’m a Hispanic kid,” said Medina, who now attends Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology. “I live with my grandmother, who is disabled and who is on welfare. We have nothing. But because of this school I may go to M.I.T. for free. Because of these teachers, who made sure we have everything we need.”

Medina was talking about Global Technology Preparatory, a public middle school that had introduced him to Google’s Code Next program, which is designed to recruit gifted black and Latino students into the tech industry. “Because of Global Tech, I know as much computer science as a college freshman or sophomore,” he added.

Medina was among dozens of alumni, parents, former teachers, and community members who came out, over the last two weeks, to offer testimonials for the small school that, they say, did big things for the poor kids of color in its charge. However, last week, at a contentious hearing of the Panel for Education Policy, which makes the final determination on proposed school closings and mergers across the city, the education department won approval for its plan to “merge” Global Tech with P.S. 7, a K-8 school. The two schools share a building on East 120th Street in East Harlem.

Global Tech, which was founded under Mayor Bloomberg, is one of the rare schools effectively being closed even though it is not failing; the reason given by the education department is that the two merged schools are both under-enrolled.

A one-to-one laptop school, Global Tech has consistently scored above its peers on standardized tests. It also has offered supports that have enabled a population of poor students of color, over one-third of whom had Individualized Education Plans (I.E.P.s), to attend some of the city’s best public schools. Most of its alums also have gone on to college.

“Consolidations are intended to improve under-enrolled schools and to address the budgetary and programmatic and performance challenges that arise as a result of low enrollment,” explained Josh Wallack, deputy chancellor at the Department of Education, at a joint public hearing held earlier this month in the P.S. 7 auditorium. “Students attending the consolidated P.S.7 will have access to a wider variety of academic and enrichment opportunities, interventions and other supports that would not be financially feasible for either of the individual schools to offer in the absence of a consolidation.”

That’s an argument current Global Tech parents and former teachers dispute. They say the merger was engineered at the end of the last school year, before required consultation with the community, and to the detriment of both schools. Last spring, Alexandra Estrella, the District 4 superintendent, forced out Global Tech’s principal, David Baiz. She also rejected every teacher-tenure application Baiz had approved. In the wake of Baiz’s departure, all but two of Global Tech’s 16 full-time faculty took jobs at other schools—though most returned for the hearings, sporting t-shirts inscribed “Greatness that Perseveres” and “GTP Forever.”

By the start of this school year, middle-school classes at the two schools were already co-mingled. The MacBooks once assigned to each Global Tech student are scattered throughout the building. Students with I.E.P.s are not receiving mandated services, according to several parents and former teachers who maintain contact with Global Tech families. While Global Tech’s after-school program is still offered by Citizen Schools, a nonprofit contracted by the city, it is no longer mandatory and few students attend. There have also been reports of “raging fights” and “chaos and disarray,” according to a broadly distributed email from Chrystina Russell, the school’s founding principal.

Estrella also replaced P.S. 7’s principal, Jackie Pryce-Harvey, who had helped found Global Tech. After Pryce-Harvey’s departure, some special programs there also disappeared. Indeed, at one point, Baiz and Pryce-Harvey had suggested merging P.S. 7’s middle school with Global Tech, under Baiz’s leadership; but the idea was rejected by Estrella.

“Respectfully, GTP never had a problem with resources,” said Ramona Gross at the joint public hearing on Global Tech. Gross credits the school and its programming for the fact that her son, William, who had an I.E.P., is now a freshman at Utica College.

“He came to Global Tech a small, quiet, scared, stuttering kid,” said Gross. “Global Tech taught him leadership” and self-confidence.

Current parents and students also say they are unhappy with the merger. Ysabel Martinez’s youngest son, Joseph, picked Global Tech because his brother Josniel had a wonderful experience at the school. Josniel, who had an I.E.P., represented Global Tech at a White House conference in 2011; he now attends York College, a four-year CUNY school, and aspires one day to become president.

The boys’ mother says, in Spanish: “I didn’t know about the changes. I didn’t know the principal had left, that it’s a different school.”

Joseph is not happy at the merged school, she adds, and they are now looking for a new school.

During her turn at the microphone, Shannon Meminger, a former Global Tech dean, reeled off well over a dozen partnership-based programs the school had offered, many of them anchored by a mandatory after-school program, itself a partnership with Boston-based Citizen Schools: the Apollo theater, Google, Little Kids Rock, as well as other arts- and science-oriented programs.

Yet, the one thing Global Tech has struggled with since its inception is enrollment. The school has never had more than about 175 students and enrollment has plunged during the recent year of turmoil to fewer than 130 students.

Neighborhood charter schools, which now educate one out of every four children in Harlem and cream students who do well on standardized tests—one reason public schools like Global Tech fill up with kids with I.E.P.s.—may contribute to the enrollment challenges. Private donations also allow charters to spend on advertising and recruiting families.

Others at the hearings blamed Bloomberg who built his new small-school strategy on closing failing schools. The problem with this theory is that Global Tech’s entrepreneurial approach to raising funds and forging partnerships, its dedicated educators—not a single teacher left during Baiz’s last year as principal—and relatively strong student performance, made it just the sort of small school the Bloomberg administration was inclined to protect.

Not so Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor who will soon retire, and who has expressed her distrust of small schools and overseen 21 consolidations. “We don’t run schools as charities,” Fariña said during last week’s panel hearing. Nor did she respond to demands for an investigation of superintendent Estrella, whose actions at Global Tech, as well as other District 4 schools, including Central Park East 1 and Esperanza, have earned her censure and scorn.

“The school was shot, decimated by the superintendent,” says Isaac Carmignani, one of the members of the Panel for Education Policy appointed by Mayor de Blasio. “I spoke from the stage about my concern about what we heard. You don’t get 150 people speaking with one voice from all stakeholders.” Carmignani added that he voted for the merger because there is no going back for Global Tech. (The panel’s vote included six for merger, four abstentions and one recusal.)

Not everyone was moved by the testimony in favor of Global Tech. Servia Silva, the District 4 union representative, never spoke on behalf of the school. Neither Silva nor Estrella responded to interview requests.

Several participants expected a representative of the Manhattan Borough President to defend the school; the borough president, Gale Brewer, came to the meeting herself, but did not speak. Michael Kraft, a panel member appointed by Brewer, says she doesn’t try to influence his vote. Kraft, who said he knew nothing about Global Tech until a week or two ago, voted to abstain because he, too, agrees, “The school that gave those great supports is just not there anymore.”  

There are two lessons from the unraveling of Global Tech: First, the process for getting meaningful community input before schools are closed or merged is broken. Second, the education bureaucracy that Mayor Bloomberg tried to dismantle is, under Mayor de Blasio, as strong as ever.

***
Andrea Gabor is the author of “After the Education Wars,” to be published by The New Press in June 2018, and Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College/CUNY. On Twitter @aagabor.

***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



Print Friendly and PDF

Editor's Choice


Gotham Gazette: New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
Gotham Gazette: 
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
Gotham Gazette: 
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Gotham Gazette: 
City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years