NAACP says inequality at heart of co-location lawsuit

Miller Photography NAACP New York State President Hazel Dukes says that “the truth of why the NAACP filed this lawsuit” is because all children should get “the resources they need.”

Miller Photography PS 149 PTA President Sonya Hampton (left), with PTA member Miriam Holmes, was among those who affirmed the leading role of the NAACP in decades of civil rights struggles.

Defending the NAACP and the UFT against a coordinated attack on their recent lawsuit challenging school closings and charter co-locations, NAACP New York State President Hazel Dukes convened parents, press and politicians at a press conference in front of the offices of the Harlem Success Charter Network on June 3 to set the record straight.

Dr. Dukes said that the NAACP joined the suit to ensure that students in district buildings where charters are co-located have the same access to facilities as the charters do. “Give them the resources they need. That’s the truth of why the NAACP filed this lawsuit,” she said.

In an op-ed about the lawsuit that appeared in The Washington Post on June 3, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous wrote: “The city’s actions impede learning, increase tensions among students and tear at the fabric of communities. When one set of students is perceived as getting preferential treatment over another, or the city refuses to work with parents to fix problems at a school before closing it, the inequity leaves all our children suffering.”

Several parents at the press conference described “separate and unequal” facilities, where charter schools took over special education classrooms, playgrounds, gyms and libraries in Harlem district schools. They said the students in district classrooms were left to eat lunch at 10 a.m. and get gym just once a week. District schools lost counseling rooms and had to turn over their middle-school labs to charter kindergartens, the parents said.

Harlem Success founder Eva Moskowitz organized a demonstration against the NAACP on May 26 (she closed her schools for part of the day to encourage parents and children to attend) after it filed the suit on May 18. A rash of editorials and op-eds by Moskowitz’s husband and others followed that tried to distort the lawsuit and tar the NAACP.

But the organization’s supporters, including UFT President Michael Mulgrew, Transit Workers Union Local 100 and longtime Harlem elected officials such as City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson, State Sen. Bill Perkins and Assemblyman Keith Wright joined local parents and PTA presidents to affirm the leading role of the NAACP in decades of civil rights struggles.

Mulgrew charged that the mayor, the chancellor and the Panel for Educational Policy knowingly approved co-locations that would harm children.

“Anyone who wants to perpetuate injustice and inequality on students, I can guarantee you this: You will always see the UFT and the NAACP standing there saying we’re not going to let it happen,” he said.

Assemblyman Wright said he wasn’t opposed to charter schools, “but when people misquote, mischaracterize and vilify the NAACP, it is wrong.”

Wright said that he voted in favor of the state charter law back in 1998 on the assumption that charters would provide their own buildings. “It has not worked out that way,” he said, and co-locations have turned over resources to charter schools at district schools’ expense.

“We have created two separate and unequal classes of education. That’s what has happened here in Harlem,” he said.

Dukes said co-locations have introduced a new form of segregation into the schools in which district students are treated as “second-class citizens.”

“We didn’t come here to fight charters,” Dr. Dukes said, calling for charter and district parents to meet together to find common cause.