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Staten Island protest draws 500
May 22, 2008 10:33 AM
Staten Island educators and parents express their unhappiness with the cuts to the borough’s schools at a rally at PS 36.
Thirty months ago, eight out of 10 Staten Islanders gave their votes to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He is very popular on Staten Island, especially on the South Shore of the borough where PS 36 is located.
But on May 12, approximately 500 irate Staten Island parents, community members and teachers turned out to protest the mayor’s budget cuts to their schools and joined Queens City Councilman Tony Avella in chanting, “Klein must go! Klein must go!” — an indication that Bloomberg’s base is angry with the cuts to their children’s education. This is a top quality-of-life issue for citizens of the borough.
“The mayor can’t use the bottom line on our kids,” Avella added. “There should be no cuts. Not one penny.”
The rally, organized by the Keep the Promises Coalition, drew support from all three of the borough’s Council members, the UFT, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators and the Staten Island Federation of PTAs.
Staten Island’s three Councilmen — Vincent Ignizio, Michael McMahon and James Oddo — were presented with petitions containing 10,000 signatures from people opposed to the cuts. Each of them vowed to fight the cuts and to preserve the education support needed for the students of Staten Island.
The impetus for the rally came from the parents at PS 36.
Some of the loudest applause of the night came when Curtis HS Principal Aurelia Curtis denounced the cuts and recounted how she got an e-mail one night at 10 p.m. from the Department of Education and the next day, when she arrived at school, $273,000 worth of cuts had been imposed on her.
“Where I come from,” Curtis said, “that is not a cut. It is theft. That money was taken at night when no one was watching.”
Curtis PTA President Patti Newman said school doesn’t have enough money for basic tools for the students and that even the “Gothic” desks, which match the age of the building (it opened in 1904), needed to be replaced.
“The Grim Reaper works for DOE,” she said.
Irina Denisenko, a student at Staten Island Technical HS, also energized the crowd by quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “We cannot always build a future for our youth but we can build youth for our future.”
She said the cuts at her school “was the mother of all difficulties.”
PS 14 Chapter Leader Donna Coppolla noted how her school, which is on the state’s list of persistently dangerous schools, was promised more money to deal with safety issues.
“Instead, we are getting less money,” she said. There will be seven positions at risk and class size will increase if the cuts are not rescinded, she added. “These are outrageous cuts that are devastating to our children.”
Before he led the PS 36 5th-grade band in playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” teacher Richard Casparie asked the audience to imagine what it would be like without a band.
“If these cuts go through,” he said, “we will not have a band next year.”
Parent Ellen Ebrahim told how 16 PS 36 parents formed a committee to organize against the cuts, adding that a well-rounded education includes music, the arts and physical education. “And parents should not have to purchase supplies for the school,” she said.
In one of the most dramatic moments of the night, parents went to the microphone and listed, one by one, nearly every school in Staten Island and how much Bloomberg had cut from each. The amounts ranged from $28,000 to $330,000 and totaled nearly $6 million.
UFT District 31 Representative Sean Rotkowitz said: “Despite a multi-billion dollar budget surplus, Mayor Bloomberg wants to cut $450 million from schools that he had promised for the coming school year. Next year’s proposed cuts of $22 million [for the district and Staten Island high schools] are obscene and ridiculous.
“This,” he added, “is cutting to the bone.”
