investigate whether the Valley Club violated federal civil rights laws when it kicked out a group of children from the Creative Steps Day Camp and canceled the camp’s contract.
“When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,” Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. “The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately.”
The next day the club told the camp director that the camp’s membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded.
One of the most astounding of many astounding moments in this story was the public statement from John Duesler, president of the Valley Swim Club, which said:
“There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club.”
As the ColorOfChange.org letter to Holder notes, canceling the Creative Steps Day Camp’s contract
after learning that the children at the camp were largely African-American and Latino [is] a possible violation of section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
[T]he staff at Girard College, a private Philadelphia boarding school for children who live in low-income and single parent homes, stepped in and offered their pool.
“We had to help,” said Girard College director of Admissions Tamara Leclair. “Every child deserves an incredible summer camp experience.”
The school already serves 500 campers of its own, but felt they could squeeze in 65 more – especially since the pool is vacant on the day the Creative Steps had originally planned to swim at Valley Swim Club.
“I’m so excited,” camp director Alethea Wright exclaimed. There are still a few logistical nuisances — like insurance — the organizations have to work out, but it seems the campers will not stay dry for long.
NBC Philadelphia also reports that US Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) will investigate the discrimination claim.
“The allegations against the swim club as they are reported are extremely disturbing,” Specter said in a statement. “I am reaching out to the parties involved to ascertain the facts. Racial discrimination has no place in America today.”
Oh, lastly, kudos to the owners of Gumdrops & Sprinkles in Wayne, PA who gave the Creative Steps kids a free day of candy and ice cream making while they are waiting for all the the details with Girard College to be worked out. If you want to show Gumdrops & Sprinkles some love for showing the Creative Steps kids some love, click on the store photo and leave Gumdrops & Sprinkles a comment on their Yelp page.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 9, 2009 at 10:40 pm
I had a knot in my stomach and could not sleep last night after watching those three white punks go after Jay Phillips. But telling over 60 kids that they are not welcome at a swimming pool that they have paid to use is a whole other level of cruelty—especially when the president of the swim club reportedly gave as reason that
[t]here was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club.
The kids don’t need to know their history to be hurt by this, but it is also the case that they all have parents and grandparents who were alive when Blacks were kept out of white swimming areas. I hope to hear that the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice is investigating this incident.
You may remember the story of Ja’eisha Scott. It broke almost exactly four years ago.
A Black kindergarten girl in Pinellas County, Florida had a tantrum in school. The school decided the best way to handle it was to call the police and request that the girl be charged and arrested. St. Petersburg Police officers responded to the call; the officers felt the best thing to do was handcuff the small child. Because handcuffs are not designed to fit five year olds they had to use plastic ties on the girl’s wrists; they hand cuffed her ankles and kept her bound in the back seat of police cruiser for several hours, while they sought to press charges against her. Footage of the police forcing the girl’s hands behind her back and cuffing her and of excerpts of tantrum went viral on the web and played repeatedly on TV for some days.
The suit accuses school officials of mishandling the situation when the girl threw a violent tantrum in class at Fairmount Park Elementary.
The girl, now 8, will need long-term therapy, says the lawsuit, filed March 12 in Pinellas circuit court by Inga Akins, 27, the girl’s mother.
“As a result of this incident, (the girl) is petrified about attending school, is afraid of law enforcement officers, has been severely traumatized and suffers from fear and anxiety,” the suit says. The girl “has a permanent impairment related to the situation with the police and will require continuing long-term therapy and neurodiagnostic testing.”…
The suit, which accuses Fairmount Park Elementary and the School Board of negligence, malicious prosecution for calling police and a civil rights violation, seeks more than $15,000 in damages. Akins has hired high-powered attorney Willie Gary.
“Obviously, we deny liability and will defend it,” said School Board attorney Jim Robinson.
I blogged the hell out of this story for several months. Here’s a selection of my posts, by no means exhaustive:
It’s disappointing to read in the new article about Inga Akins’ lawsuit against the School Board that
A police investigation found race was not a factor; the lead officer, who isn’t seen on the tape, was black. But the incident led the department to outline strict rules regarding the handcuffing of children under age 8.
By the time the police arrive and handcuff Ja’eisha it does not matter what color the officers are. Her treatment takes place in a context of persistent inequality and especially punitive attitudes towards African American students…. The presence of an African American police officer overseeing the handcuffing does not mitigate the racism inherent in the event.
“[S]trict rules regarding the handcuffing of children under age 8″ sounds like a bit progress, but does that even mean the practice has been forbidden? (And should 9 year olds expect to be handcuffed if they get out of line?) A ban on handcuffing young school kids would be a good start but it would not address the repressive atmosphere that Ja’eisha Scott and other Black kids have found themselves in.
If you are unfamiliar with the footage of the handcuffing of Ja’eisha Scott, it is still online (see YouTube player, below). One of the things that is so remarkable is that when the officers arrived, Ja’eisha was seated and not acting out. You can hear someone, probably the assistant prinicipal, reporting on Ja’eisha’s behavior. The cuffing looks like a punishment for the reported behavior more than it looks like restraint of a supposedly uncontrollable child. In 2005, it seemed to me that the assistant principal Nicole Dibenedetto’s behavior needs to be scrutinized. Some reports contradict Dibenedetto’s claims that she tried to pursue other avenues before calling city police to arrest a 5 year old. I am still flabbergasted to have read that Dibenedetto was disappointed when charges were not filed against five year old Ja’eisha Scott.
“To think we would consider charging a child of that age with a crime is almost comical,” said Bruce Bartlett, chief assistant state attorney. Di Benedetto, 31, was disappointed charges were not filed because it was the third time the girl had behaved violently, the police report says (emphasis added).
If the characterization of Ja’eisha’s past behavior is accurate, I would expect an assistant principal, concerned about the well-being and development of young children, to focus on much different interventions than criminal charges for temper tantrums.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 7, 2009 at 2:42 am
My friend Alycia drove me through the lower 9th ward in her four-wheeler, navigating the twisted, pot-holed roads like a pro. It looked basically like abandoned territory, dozens maybe hundreds of blocks of weed-filled vacant lots. Alycia slowed down, pointed out the window at vacant lot after vacant lot and said “Home, home, home, home.” Sure enough, if you looked carefully through the weeds and garbage, you could make out the foundations of what were once houses.
“Holy cow,” I said, suddenly getting it. The people I saw on TV two and a half years ago in the filth of the Superdome … they once lived here. “Where did all these people go?” I asked, absently, stupidly, insultingly.
Alycia just shook her head as if to say, “People who don’t live here just don’t get it.” And she’s right.
But seeing it first-hand at least puts a human face on the familiar litany of statistics. Almost two thousand people dead. Eighty percent of the city under water for an average of fifty-seven days. Four hundred thousand jobs lost. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand homes destroyed.
And a list of intractable problems so long that it gives you a headache. There’s soil contamination, for one, and serious safety problems with some FEMA trailers, for another. And then there’s something that a guy I met called, “the Katrina cough” – a dry heave he said his doctor couldn’t diagnose, but which just got worse and worse for the whole six months he was working in neighborhoods with severe water damage. Finally, he just had to stop. “After a while, you don’t even want to breathe, the cough hurts so much,” he said.
But Patel turns from this to embrace an optimism about proposed solutions that are harming thousands of low-income, predominantly African-American students in New Orleans.
And still, President Scott Cowen of Tulane University, who gave a remarkable afternoon keynote address at the Clinton Global Initiative, said that he’s never been so optimistic about the city. Before Katrina, it had the worst school system in America, serious crime and corruption problems, a profoundly inadequate infrastructure. And now, the city leaders along with common residents are dreaming about what a model 21st century city would look like. What kind of public education system should it have? What kind of health care delivery? And perhaps most daringly, how can all of it be done on an entirely green basis – from working-class parts of town to tourist areas.
“This is the greatest social experiment in America,” President Cowen said.
Yes there is a social experiment going on, but not one that justifies Patel’s title, “New Orleans: Recover, Rebuild, Rebirth.” New Orleans attorney Bill Quigley writes:
There is a massive experiment being performed on thousands of primarily African American children in New Orleans. No one asked the permission of the children. No one asked permission of their parents. This experiment involves a fight for the education of children.
This is the experiment.
The First Half
Half of the nearly 30,000 children expected to enroll in the fall of 2007 in New Orleans public schools have been enrolled in special public schools, most called charter schools. These schools have been given tens of millions of dollars by the federal government in extra money, over and above their regular state and local money, to set up and operate. These special public schools are not open to every child and do not allow every student who wants to attend to enroll. Some charter schools have special selective academic criteria which allow them to exclude children in need of special academic help. Other charter schools have special admission policies and student and parental requirements which effectively screen out many children. The children in this half of the experiment are taught by accredited teachers in manageable size classes. There are no overcrowded classes because these charter schools have enrollment caps allowing them to turn away students. These schools also educate far fewer students with academic or emotional disabilities. Children in charter schools are in better facilities than the other half of the children. These schools are getting special grants from Laura Bush to rebuild their libraries and grants from other foundations to help them educate. These schools do educate some white children along with African-American children. These are public schools, but they are not available to all public school students.
The Other Half
The other half of public school students, over ten thousand children, have been assigned to a one-year-old experiment in public education run by the State of Louisiana called the “Recovery School District” (RSD) program. The education these children receive will be compared to the education received by the first half in the charter schools. These children are effectively what is called the “control group” of an experiment Ð those against whom the others will be evaluated.
The RSD schools have not been given millions of extra federal dollars to operate. The new RSD has inexperienced leadership. Many critical vacancies exist in their already-insufficient district-wide staff. Many of the teachers are uncertified. In fact, the RSD schools do not yet have enough teachers, even counting the uncertified, to start school in the fall of 2007. Some of the RSD school buildings scheduled to be used for the fall of 2007 have not yet been built.
In the first year of this experiment, the RSD had one security guard for every 37 students. Students at John McDonough High said their RSD school, which employed more guards than teachers, had a “prison atmosphere.” In some schools, children spent long stretches of their school days in the gymnasium waiting for teachers to show up to teach them.
There is little academic or emotional counseling in the RSD schools. Children with special needs suffer from lack of qualified staff. College-prep math and science classes and language immersion are rarely offered. Classrooms keep filling up as new children return to New Orleans and are assigned to RSD schools.
Many of the RSD schools do not have working kitchens or water fountains. Bathroom facilities are scandalous. Teachers at one school report there are two bathrooms for the entire school – one for all the male students, faculty and staff and another for all the females in the building.
Danatus King, of the NAACP in New Orleans, said “What happened last year was a tragedy. Many of the city’s children were denied an education last year because of a failure to plan on the part of the RSD.”
Hardly any white children attend this half of the school experiment.
These are the public schools available to the rest of the public school students.
I first read this passage by Bill Quigley in Steven Miller and Jack Gerson’s report, “The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools,” which I’ve posted in full, below the fold. Miller and Gerson discuss what is happening in New Orleans in detail and put in the context a dangerous national trend which is leaving our schools more unequal than ever. I urge you to read it.
Here’s the deal. We need to be in the top four charities that get the most unique donors in order to win the $50,000 for the Sharing Foundation. Right now we’re number 5, only trailing by 28 donors.
Essentially, I am asking YOU for $10 (USD) to help children in Cambodia. Donate herebefore the contest ends 1/31 at 3:00 PM EST.
While we’re on the subject of civil rights and Dr. King’s vision of an inclusive society, I thought I’d share this sweet video (via The Bilerico Project)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 20, 2008 at 12:04 pm
By Briley Richmond
Ocean Springs, MS
Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Mississippi Press
A 6-year-old child, Blake Pendergrass, was struck and killed by an automobile in Escatawpa the other day. Escatawpa is about 20 miles from my home in Ocean Springs. I didn’t know him. I would imagine something like that happens somewhere in America every day — at least every week. But this one hurt me. Hurt me bad. You see, the little boy lived in a FEMA trailer park — a Katrina FEMA trailer park in Escatawpa. Escatawpa is — well, if you were plotting out a Monopoly board, it ain’t Boardwalk. It’s more like one of the purples right past “Go” — you know, the ones where the rent for landing on the space is $2.00.
I visited the scene where Blake was killed. The park in which he lived has no playground. Blake was killed while he was crossing the street attempting to get to his “playground.” The trailers are stacked in compactly, like sardines in a can. There is no room for a playground, just trailers. And more trailers. All identical. That’s how you identify a FEMA trailer park. The trailers have no amenities — no “identities.” Every one is just the same. Twenty-four feet long. Eight feet wide. White. Stacked right together. No thought is given to the children. No parks, no playgrounds, no sidewalks — the park just screams, “You’re just a bunch of poor kids and we don’t care.”
Immediately across the street from the trailer park sits an abandoned convenience store, complete with a parking lot — unused. The children of the trailer park have adopted the parking lot as their unofficial playground. Only to get to it they have to cross the street. The “street” is a highway. So 6-year-old Blake Pendergrass was killed while crossing the highway to get from his FEMA trailer home to his abandoned parking lot playground. And on that same day our governor, Haley Barbour, was busy taking $600 million that the people of this nation gave to my community for housing for Katrina victims, people just like little Blake, and turning it over to the business interests at the port of Gulfport, about 30 miles away — so Dole Pineapple and other multi-million dollar business entities could have that money instead of Blake. You think maybe the people of this nation expected the money given for housing following Katrina would be given to Blake, and not Dole Pineapple?
The people of this great nation gave the victims of that horrible storm $5 billion so we could provide housing for the children like Blake. But it hasn’t happened that way. Five billion dollars is enough money to buy 60,000, $80,000 homes — we lost 65,000 homes (and yes, one can still buy a home for $80,000 in Mississippi). I invite you to drive around my community and I ask you if you see anything that looks remotely like 60,000 homes. Or 30,000 homes. Or even 10,000 homes. Our governor has been so busy passing out money to his friends and cronies, he has managed to build not a single home to cover the needs of a child like Blake — and there are thousands of children in just the same situation as Blake. The governor gave a lawyer friend of his in Moss Point $1 million. Northrup-Grumman, a major defense contractor was given $250 million. The Hancock Bank, our largest, got the benefit of hundreds of millions. The business entities at the port of Gulfport, $600 million. All diverted from the funds intended to provide housing for Katrina victims.
There are flowers on the side of the road marking the spot where little Blake was killed — a tribute of sorts I guess. I started crying when I saw them. Oh the horror, the horror. I’m so sorry little fella. I’ve tried so hard. I’ve written letters to the editors of dozens of newspapers. I’ve called Congressmen, Senators. But I am an old man now — I am tired — and for the first time in my life I have to own up to it — I am beaten — I have failed. I am so sorry Blake. My governor went to Washington, D.C., and got $5 billion. But all he got for you was those damn flowers.
The Beatles were my first musical obsession. When I became a fan of the Beatles in middle school, I collected every recording, poured over every liner note, read biographies, studied the lyrics, listened to the solo projects . . .
It was the first time I’d gotten into music like this. I think it was around my sophomore year in high school that I hit my saturation point with the Beatles. I never stopped liking them, but I moved on. In high school and college, I found Neil Young, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Greatful Dead, Talking Heads, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorious, Parliament/Funkadelic, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus—to name just some, at random . . .
After my dad passed away in 1997, I took it to a new level with Frankie Newton. I compensated for the fact that he only has about 50 recorded songs by collecting recordings by everyone he associated with. For several years, I immersed myself in Newton’s musical milieu, high art, pre-Bop Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the earlier stuff from the 1920s, the foundations.
After a while, the Jazz obsession mellowed. Maybe around 2000, I started actively listening again to music from the second half of the 20th century and to current 21st century stuff.
But, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s all come back around to the Beatles. With the help of YouTube, my 4-year-old has been doing with the Beatels what I did starting in around 5th grade. The favorite record for some time has been Let It Be. I am sure we have watched each song played on the rooftop of Apple Records at least 100 times. It’s a good thing the Beatles are so damn good, cause otherwise I’d be going out of mind.
Anyway, I’m telling you all of this to try to explain what it was like to hear this John Lennon outtake from 1968. I love the rooftop performance of “I’ve Got a Feeling.” And I’ve always thought that John makes the song with the song fragment he weaves into Paul’s bluesy love song. What I didn’t know until earlier tonight was that John had recorded “Everyone” separately. From what I could read online, there are a couple of versions out there. So far, I’ve just found this one. It’s rough around the edges, the Julia-like guitar part doesn’t seem totally worked out—and it is beautiful. John really gets me at the end. After the circular lyrics, delivered over repetitive guitar picking, he trails off with that “everybody got the wrong time, everybody got the wrong time . . .”
COUSHATTA — Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children. . . .
[Superintendent Kay] Easley would not comment much on the allegations Wednesday, saying it is a personnel issue. She acknowledged that she has investigated the claim. And she confirmed that the bus driver did not run her route Wednesday, nor would she today.
Asked if the driver would work for the rest of the year, Easley said, "I'm not going to answer the questions. " You're getting all that you're going to get from me. I'm sorry."
How in 2006 is this possible? Ask yourself how in 2006 is it possible downstate to evict 2/3 of the Black population from New Orleans, and you have something like an answer.
Or maybe it's the other way around. Bus driver Delores Davis said to herself, if they can choose whether to let Blacks back into NOLA, I can choose where Blacks get to sit on my bus.
When segregation was the law of the land such analogies may have been more explicit and more obvious. They still govern the minds and actions of Americans today.
As along as we're making analogies, it's worth saying, too, that separate is never equal:
After Richmond and Williams [parents and guardians to the children] filed complaints with the School Board, Transportation Supervisor Jerry Carlisle asked Davis to make seat assignments for her passengers, Sessoms said.
"But she still assigned the black children to the back of the bus," she added.
And the nine children had to share only two seats, meaning the older children had to hold the younger ones in their laps.
Of course the problem is just one bigoted driver, and the situation is easy enough to rectify, right?
A new solution reached Monday by School Board officials has a black bus driver driving across town to pick up the nine black children.
Nope, racist bus driver Delores Davis is just a symptom of the American disease.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 28, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Particularly interesting was the interview with Dr. Gwendolyn Webb-Johnson concerning her work on something she calls “instructional racism,” the racism that causes teachers to have low expectations for African American students and to funnel them through the special education system, in which they are grossly over represented.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 7, 2005 at 1:43 am
Pete Seeger continues to be a big favorite for my toddler. Standing in the chair in front of our stereo, he pulls the Pete Seeger CD of choice out of the stack, gets the disc out of the case, opens the CD player drawer, places the disc in, closes the drawer—and finds his favorite songs by himself.
This all started with him simply calling out the names of songs or artists he wanted to hear and repeating the name with great insistence, until we relented. Then he started asking for CDs to put into the player himself. And now, most recently, he’s been cuing up the desired songs without help.
The first song we saw him do this with was Sweet Potatoes, on We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert (1963). Our little boy figured out how to press the track advance button three times to get to track 3 on disc 2. What really blew our minds, though, was when he figured out how to get to track 18 on the Children’s Concert At Town Hall (Abiyoyo). I’m pretty sure that at 2 1/2 he hasn’t learned to count to 18 but rather has learned to recognize what the track number for Abiyoyo looks like in the CD player display. Still, it’s pretty darn cool . . .
It’s a good thing I like Pete Seeger so much. Instead of getting sick of the recordings, I’ve been finding new pleasures in songs I hadn’t paid as much attention to when I was younger. The first song that struck me this way was Pete’s rendition of the the John Lair song, Little Birdie. The liner notes say Pete learned the song in the 1940s from one the Coon Creek Girls, who were Lair’s proteges. Pete’s mountain-style banjo on this track is hypnotic, and the lyrics are beautiful. When I tried to find a transcription of them online, there were many versions of the song, but none with words that Pete sings on this recording—which makes me think that it was Pete himself who came up with this most deeply poetic and mysterious version of the song that I’ve come to love so well:
Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes you fly so high?
It’s because I am a true little bird
And I do not fare to die?
Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your wings so blue?
It’s because I’ve been a grieving
Grievin’ after you.
Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your head so red?
Well after all that I’ve been through
It’s a wonder I ain’t dead.
Little birdie, little birdie,
Come sing to me a song.
I’ve a short while to be here,
And a long time to be gone.
In the middle two verses, the movement between the images and the states of mind and emotion they signify reminds me of reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Exprience (of all things). Maybe that’s just the ballad tradition bubbling up through both the 19th and 20th centuries, but I can’t really say.
Now to the song that got me writing this post in the first place: Oh What A Beautiful City, as performed on We Shall Overcome. You can read the lyrics of a different version here, but first just sit back and listen.
The credits say Pete’s version is as adapted and arranged by Marian Hicks. There is almost nothing about her on the internet, and there do not seem to be any recordings to her name. In looking around, I discovered a noted arrangement by Edward Boatner, who seems like an interesting figure in Black musical history whom I hadn’t heard of before.
I really want to know about Marian Hicks. If any readers can tell me more about her, or if anyone knows good recordings of Oh What A Beautiful City by African American gospel artists, or any other interesting recordings, or anything else about the song’s history, please let me know in the comments.
UPDATE
My wife recalls reading in Rise Up Singing that Marian Hicks was an African American friend of Pete Seeger’s family and that he learned to sing the song from her. I don’t actually have copy of RUS, but I’ll check this out as soon as I can.
CORRECTION
Second stanza of Little Birdie corrected from “dreaming” and “dreamin’” to “grieving” and “grievin’.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 22, 2005 at 10:23 am
Yesterday, the St. Petersburg, FL Police Department issued a report concerning the allegations that Officers Mark Williams and Nicholas Lazzari were guilty of “Inefficiency / Conduct Unbecoming an Employee [CUBE]” when they handcuffed five-year-old Ja’eisha Scott at Fairmount Elementary School last March in St. Petersburg. While the resultant change in police and school policy concerning children in kindergarden through third grade is good, the focus on the conduct of the officers avoids the real questions about what is happening inside the Pinellas County Schools.
Some department violations were committed by the officers involved. For example, Officer Williams did not properly check out on the radio on three different occasions during these events. A more in-depth and thorough investigation should have been conducted prior to taking Ja’Eisha into custody. Officer Lazzari stated in his police report and then verbally to a supervisor that he felt the Baker Act [pdf] would have been appropriate. However, he should have recognized that Ja’Eisha did not qualify as a Baker Act.
Ultimately, the final disposition was the proper one. Ja’Eisha was released to her mother at the scene. She had not been transported from the school grounds at any time. No charges were filed and no referrals were made.
Both charges were sustained against Officer Williams and the charge of inefficiency was sustained against Officer Lazzari, but the Police Department has taken no disciplinary action against them. Rather, the St. Petersburg Police Department has issued a revision of its Juvenile Procedures:
In essence, supervisors will become involved in the disposition of children under the age of eight (8) prior to them being taken into custody. Our Legal Division will also be publishing a Legal Notice to all personnel indicating that in our Circuit Court, children less than eight (8) years of age are generally not prosecuted for crimes. Our Youth Resources Division has been tasked with working with the school system to develop some training for the patrol officer in dealing with small children who are displaying violent or disruptive behavior.
Th police investigation “found no evidence of racism by the officers.” I’ve written extensively about the racism inherent in this story and about Florida’s child-hating juvenile policy. However, I’d like to return to another theme of my reporting on Ja’eisha Scott case—the cover-up of the school’s role in Ja’eisha’s abuse, especially the role of Assistant Principal Nicole Dibenedetto.
When I was writing about this story in April, I noted that there were two conflicting accounts as to whether Ms. Dibenedetto pursued any measures other than calling St. Petersburg Police. An early report said Ms. Dibenedetto attempted to call Pinellas Schools police, but there was a mix up and someone in the school office called the city police instead. A later report stated that “the school called city police again after Pinellas schools police could not come,” suggesting that the school did, in fact, call and get through to the school police.
In the Executive Summary of the St. Petersburg Police Memorandum on the allegations concerning “Inefficiency / Conduct Unbecoming an Employee,” published in yesterday’s SP Times, there is a detailed description of the chain of actions that led to city police coming to Fairmount Elementary School on a call concerning Ja’eisha Scott, the week before the handcuffing that was captured on video.
On March 8, 2005, Ja’Eisha engaged in inappropriate conduct in her classroom. An attempt was made by school staff to contact her mother and grandmother to respond to the school, but neither of them were immediately available to respond. The staff contacted Pinellas County Schools police and attempted to get them to respond as Ja’Eisha was becoming more disruptive. They had no one immediately available to respond, and the St. Petersburg Police Department was contacted to respond. The Communications Center processed the call, but before it was dispatched, a patrol supervisor was contacted, and the supervisor appropriately canceled the call. The school was recontacted and was advised police would not be responding. Historically, the Pinellas County Schools police would handle all calls for service at public elementary schools if the call did not involve drugs, weapons or other similar situations.
Yet in the Executive Summary account of March 14, when Ja’eisha Scott was handcuffed and video taped, there is no explanation of what led to the police dispatch of officers to the school. The account begins with the officers hearing from the dispatcher in their cruisers.
On March 14, 2005, Officers Nicholas Lazzari and Joshua Hanes were dispatched to a “Disorderly Juvenile.” The dispatcher said, “It looks like it’s a battery on a school official by a 5-year-old.” The dispatcher also mentioned “Ja’Eisha Scott” by name while broadcasting the call. Because they were familiar with her, Officers Williams and Westerman rightly responded to assist. The officers arrived at the same time, and while walking toward the office, Officer Williams told Officers Lazzari and Hanes that he had contact with Ja’Eisha in the past involving a similar incident in which she destroyed property and battered a school employee. Officer Lazzari said Officer Williams indicated to him that this child may need to go to jail.
What is Fairmount Elementary School trying to hide? Why are the police colluding in keeping murky the facts of what happened inside the school while Ja’eisha Scott was having her famous tantrum?
The new rules announced yesterday are a positive development:
Under the new rules announced Thursday, dispatchers who take calls involving students in kindergarten through third grade must first ask if Pinellas Schools Police have been contacted. Superintendent Clayton Wilcox has directed principals at the district’s elementary schools to do the same.
If school police have been reached, city police will not be sent except in “aggravating, extreme circumstances,” according to the policy.
And even in those cases, officers must consult a supervisor before taking a child into custody. The supervisor will consider alternative ways of resolving the conflict, including calling a parent and using de-escalation techniques.
These procedures should help the schools avoid future police handling of children from kindergarden to third grade. But these are bare minimum measures that do not even go so far as to protect children who are in grades 4-8. There is a documented problem with Pinellas County (and the rest of Florida) criminalizing children under 12.
Most essentially, however, the focus on the police and not on the school diverts attention from profound problems concerning racism and anti-child policies in the Pinellas County schools. Without a public commitment to telling the truth about what happened to Ja’eisha Scott—and about what happens to other children, especially what happens to African American children, in Pinellas County schools—there is no real hope for progress.
This is a little dated, but it’s good and Technorati says hardly anyone blogged it. For all my fellow red diaper babies:
Pete Seeger Is 86
by STUDS TERKEL
It is hard to think of Pete Seeger as an elderly gaffer, because the boy in him, the light, remains undimmed. It was sixty-five years ago I first ran into him. He and three of his colleagues, calling themselves the Almanac Singers, were on a cross-country jalopy tour singing and creating songs for the industrial unions aborning. The CIO had begun, and how could there be labor rallies without songs? It was in the true American tradition, like the Hutchinsons, a family of singing abolitionists during the Civil War. Some of the most heartbreaking music of that fratricidal conflict was theirs.
That night when I first encountered the four wandering minstrels was a cold Chicago beauty. At 2 in the morning, my wife heard the doorbell ring. I was away rehearsing the first play in which I had ever appeared. It was Waiting for Lefty, of course. There, at the door, were the four of them. The first was a bantam–freckled, red-haired and elfin. He handed my wife a note saying: “These are good fellas. Put them up for the night.” Putting them up was a rough assignment, even for a Depression-era social worker, what with the only spare bunk being a Murphy bed that sprang from the wall. Freckles announced himself as Woody Guthrie. The second was an Ozark mountain man named Lee Hayes. The third was a writer, Millard Lampell. The fourth, somewhat diffident, more in the background, was a slim-jim of 20 or so, fretting around with his banjo. He was Pete Seeger.
Since then, Woody has died. So has Lee Hayes. So has Millard Lampell. Only Pete breathes and sings, mesmerizing audiences, whether they be Democrats, lefties, vegans or even a sprinkling of Republicans. For sixty-five years, he has held forth continuously through periods known more for their bleakness than for their hope: the cold war, the witchhunt, the civil rights and civil liberties battles. Pete has been in all of them. Wherever he was asked, when the need was the greatest, he, like Kilroy, was there. And still is. Though his voice is somewhat shot, he holds forth on that stage. Whether it be a concert hall, a gathering in the park, a street demonstration, any area is a battleground for human rights. That is why describing him as an 86-year-old gaffer is not quite true. The calendar often deceives. This is a sparkling case in point.
Of course, he’s been blacklisted so many times he probably holds the dubious record, with the possible exception of Paul Robeson, who was often his partner in crime.
Before we hoist one for Pete, let’s also remember that he’s one of the best choirmasters in the country. He may not have the technique of Robert Shaw, but the result is just as explosive. Imagine an audience of thousands as Pete sings, say, “Wimoweh.” As Pete waves his arms gently, the audience reacts as a professional choir might. I’ve seen a wizened little man, who obviously is somebody’s bookkeeper, at the command of Pete become a basso profundo, reaching two octaves lower than Chaliapin. This is the nature of Pete Seeger, who reaches out toward the further shores more effectively and more exhilaratedly than anyone I’ve ever run into.
Hail Pete, at 86, still the boy with that touch of hope in the midst of bleakness. There ain’t no one like him.
Might as well mention, in case you missed it the first time around, that I did a little bit about Pete Seeger a just over a year ago. I was actually writing about Louis Armstrong, but Pete figured into it, too.
In that post from last summer, I mention getting Pete Seeger’s Children’s Concert at Town Hall on cd after having listened to the lp endlessly as a child. The cd has been getting a lot of play around here lately because at almost 2 1/2 my son is now old enough to have his own enjoyment of Pete Seeger.
Even if you don’t have kids, the Children’s Concert is really worth getting. My wife gets choked up almost every time she hears all the children in the audience singing along—which only makes Pete’s “touch of hope in the midst of bleakness” that much more poignant, especially these days . . .
The concert was recorded in 1962, so all those kids are grown up and older than I am. I sometimes wonder who they are in the world today.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 16, 2005 at 12:51 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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