400 speak up in Park Slope

First-grader Dov Alperin speaks out against the cuts as City Councilman Brad Lander (right), parents and UFTers looks on.

Four hundred Brooklyn parents, teachers and children from nearly a dozen neighboring schools converged on Grand Army Plaza on June 10 for a spirited rally to protest threatened teacher layoffs and budget cuts. Many carried signs reading “Cut testing, not teachers,” which quickly became the day’s dominant chant.

Martha Foote, a parent at Park Slope’s PS 321, was a key organizer of her school’s contingent for the demonstration. At a warm-up rally in front of the school before the group marched to join the others, Foote warned that budget cuts and layoffs would do great damage to her high-performing school, which already has 32 children per class, suffered cuts in intervention services and still smarts from the cumulative 10 percent drop in school funding over the last two school years.

“Any layoffs will only further swell class sizes and make things much, much worse,” Foote said.

Beside her, one tiny kindergartener was hand-lettering (with all the requisite spelling errors of a 5-year-old) a sign addressed to the mayor: “No teacher layoffs! You’ve already cut enough of our future.”

Fifth-grade teacher Ronda Matthews told her group, “I tell my students what a democracy is. It means speaking up. We’re telling the government that we can’t live with these cuts.”

Art teacher Nancy Lauro said, “We’re a true community school. The reason we work so well is that parents contribute. It seems like [the Bloomberg administration] is setting schools up to fail.”

PS 321 Principal Elizabeth Phillips voiced her agreement with the rally’s goals, saying layoffs would devastate children’s educations. “It’s taking money away from our children,” she said. Phillips said she backed a progressive tax on the wealthy and slammed the city’s single-minded emphasis on testing.

At the rally at Grand Army Plaza, Julie Sturm, a parent of a 1st- grader at PS 58, said she was shocked at the mayor’s threats.

“We’ll lose teachers along with funding. We have a great school and we want to keep it that way,” she said.

Parents and children, in addition to local elected officials, spoke at the rally.

One PS 107 child said that she feared the bigger classes that would result from layoffs. “It’ll be too crowded, and we won’t be able to learn well,” she said.

Another student, reading from notes on her smart phone, suggested that “if tests are more important than layoffs, then Mayor Bloomberg needs a serious talking to.”