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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, JULY 5, 2020
BY ROSE ADAMS
Hundreds of Bay Ridge
parents and educators are
calling for the removal of
the local school district’s superintendent,
claiming that
she has turned a blind eye
to racism and special education
violations within the
district’s schools for years.
An open letter — signed
by more than 200 parents,
community members, and
faculty members — claims
that District 20 superintendent
Karina Costantino
failed to address complaints
regarding racism
and special education noncompliance
within the district,
which includes Bay
Ridge, Dyker Heights, southern
Sunset Park, and Bath
Beach.
The district’s demographics
have shifted dramatically
over the last 20
years, with Chinese students
making up 44 percent
and Latino students accounting
for nearly 27 percent of
the schools’ population in
a district that formerly was
mostly white and Catholic,
according to state data. But
petitioners say the increased
diversity has not infl uenced
the top administrator’s attitude
towards race.
“She is out of touch with
the needs of our community
because she does not respect
the voices of those she
serves. It’s past time for her
to go,” the letter reads.
“It just seemed
like nobody cared”
Speaking with Brooklyn
Paper, parents described a
culture that neglected students
with special needs.
“The way I describe this
district, especially with students
with disabilities, is
that they throw up a wall of
can’ts and won’ts,” said Bay
Ridge resident Francine Almash,
who said she’s had to
homeschool two of her three
children because of the district’s
inability to accommodate
special needs.
Almash’s second oldest
child is autistic — but for
years, school staffers at PS
102 claimed he had behavioral
problems rather than a
developmental disorder, she
said.
“My middle child wasn’t
diagnosed with autism until
he was in third grade, I
think,” she said. Her son is
Black, which she believes
played a role in the late diagnosis.
“He was constantly
being coded as having behavioral
problems, constantly
as being emotionally
disturbed.”
Many teachers at PS 102
weren’t properly trained
to manage the needs of her
now 13-year-old son, and often
punished him instead
of addressing his needs, Almash
claimed.
“It was a lack of training,
a lack of understanding,
a lack of willingness to
understand that the problem
doesn’t lie with him,”
she said, noting that staffers
locked him in classrooms
and wrapped him in
a weighted blanket when
he had outbursts, and sometimes
rewrote his special
needs classifi cation.
Following years of confl
ict, the district couldn’t
fi nd her son an appropriate
placement at any school, so
now Almash is teaching
him at home along with his
12-year-old brother, who’s
dyslexic.
“I did not want to homeschool
my kids. And it was
incredibly diffi cult, as a single
parent especially,” she
said. “It just seemed like nobody
cared.”
Almash isn’t the only
parent who’s voiced concerns
about special education
in the district. A 2019
state comptroller report
found that District 20 was
one of 13 districts citywide
with the highest rates of
IEP-noncompliance, meaning
that its schools often do
not assign or follow through
on a disabled student’s Individualized
Education Program.
“I had to fi ght them for
my daughter’s services
to the point where I actually
went to court,” said
Bay Ridge resident Tamara
Stern, whose 10-year-old
daughter has a speech disability.
Stern said that the city’s
Department of Education refused
to pay for the speech
therapist who worked best
with her daughter, and
pushed her to choose a
cheaper therapist in their
network. She refused, and
the DOE took her to court.
Stern won the case, but the
battle continued while she
was at PS 102, she said.
“At one point they wanted
me to decrease the amount
of time she was going to
speech,” she said, adding
that her husband, a middle
school teacher, doubted that
their daughter was getting
enough care. “My husband
felt that they weren’t really
on top of it.”
Accusations
of racism and
Islamophobia
Other parents told stories
of allegedly racist and
Islamophobic incidents
within some of the district’s
schools that administrators
inadequately addressed or
perpetuated.
At PS 264, which serves a
largely Muslim population,
staffers often lead Muslim
children who fast during
the month of Ramadan into
another room during lunch
time so they don’t have to
watch other students eat.
But, one mother said
that a cafeteria staffer punished
her son for laughing
during a lunch break by removing
the nine-year-old
fourth grader from the room
where he and other Muslim
students were fasting and
forcing him to watch students
eat in the cafeteria.
When she went to pick him
up from school, her son was
distraught.
“He bursted out in tears,”
said Zaman Mashrah.
Mashrah demanded that
the DOE investigate the incident,
but the investigation
ran months late and ultimately
cleared the staffer
of wrongdoing — despite
students’ testimonies confi
rming that the incident occurred,
she said.
“My son plus several
other students they questioned
said that this happened,
this occurred,” said
Mashrah, who eventually
fi led a civil rights lawsuit
with the Council of American
Islamic Relations
against the DOE. “But the
DOE still decided to stand
with their employee.”
The event wasn’t
Mashrah’s only brush with
anti-Muslim bias, she said.
Last spring, during Ramadan,
she wanted to fi ll the
lobby of PS 264 with Ramadan
themed decorations, but
the school’s administration
allegedly tried to roadblock
the project.
“I fought for almost a
month to do something as
simple as hanging moons
and crescents,” she said.
Other parents also said
their children had suffered
acts of racism in the district’s
schools that the administration
inadequately
addressed, such as racist
name-calling and bullying.
“My son was 9 when
he was fi rst called the nword,”
said Almash, whose
eldest son experienced anti-
Black racism at PS 102 and
then McKinley Junior High
School. “He also experienced
being told by other
students that he shouldn’t
bother studying because
he’d probably grow up to be
a drug dealer, and that his
opinion on a group project
didn’t matter because he’s
Black.”
Almash said she would
complain to teachers and administrators
at both schools
following the incidents, but
the schools never made a
concerted effort to curb the
perpetrators’ behavior.
“At both places the response
was always just an
offer to speak with my son —
including being called into
the AP’s offi ce and asked if
he felt safe at school, which
of course terrifi ed him,” she
said. “There was never an attempt
to handle it as a widespread
or systemic issue.”
An unresponsive
administration
While many of the parents’
complaints don’t directly
stem from the superintendent
and the district’s
community education council,
many parents feel that
Superintendent Costantino
has repeatedly allowed issues
like racism and special
education noncompliance
to fester.
“Her offi ce is supposed
to be where the buck stops
if you’re a parent and you
need help,” Almash said.
“She’s incredibly unresponsive.”
Several parents alleged
that after complaining repeatedly
to the schools and
Costantino about racism
and IEP-noncompliance,
administrators would send
the Administration for
Children’s Services to their
homes and neglect their
children’s needs as a form
of retaliation.
“Theres a lot of retaliation
against parents. What
I found is that if you follow
the path you’re supposed to
… everything was this circular
path back to the principal
of the school,” said Almash,
who added that the
school called ACS on her
twice following incidents
with her autistic child.
“Basically, both times the
ACS workers told me that
they know that schools did
this, but still it was on me
to prove that I did nothing
wrong.”
The parents’ letter and
petition also calls for the
DOE to remove a member
of District 20’s community
education council — an
elected body held by parents
— in part because of
a series of controversial
Facebook posts following
George Floyd’s killing. In
one post, Vito LaBella, a retired
police offi cer, called
Black Lives Matter a “dogwhistle”
for injuring cops,
and said he preferred to use
the phrases “All lives matter”
and “Black lives matter
too.”
“Everyone is against bad
policing. I’m pro-good policing,”
LaBella told Brooklyn
Paper, clarifying that
he believes only some of the
Black Lives Matter movement
has taken to attacking
cops and that he strongly
condemns the police killing
of George Floyd. “Our men
and women in the police department
are being targeted
for assassination.”
He also said he agreed
with Costantino’s approach
to addressing complaints of
racism.
“The best thing to say
is we condemn hate speech
against everybody,” he
said.
Superintendent Costantino,
the DOE, and Community
Education Council
20 did not respond to requests
for comment.
Charges of racism,
special-ed discrimination
plague BK school district
PS 102 in Bay Ridge, where parents levied charges of racism and
ableism. Photo by Meaghan McGoldrick