It's the kind of spat that flares thousands of times a day in schools all over the country.
But at Public School 34 in Queens Village, Assistant Principal Nancy Miller's ghastly way of handling a minor scuffle between two Haitian fourth-graders has sparked fury.
According to parents and students, Miller, who is white, chose to punish all 13 Haitian pupils in the school's only fourth-grade bilingual class - even though just two were involved in the March 16 incident.
She ordered all 13 to sit on the cafeteria floor, then made them use their fingers to eat their lunch of chicken and rice, while all the other students watched.
"In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here," several students recalled Miller saying.
Some of the punished fourth-graders were so humiliated they began to cry. A few begged Miller for spoons to eat.
Her behavior has triggered a probe by the schools' office of special investigations, as parents accused Miller of racial bias and demanded that she and the principal be fired.
One of those punished was Woosvelt Isac. His father, Sony Isac, noticed the boy was upset that night.
"He was almost crying," Isac said yesterday. "I asked him what was wrong. Then he told me, 'They put me sitting on the floor. They put me to eat with my hands.' I couldn't believe it."
At the suggestion of a teacher, several children wrote their accounts of the incident that afternoon in their bilingual class.
This is what one child wrote:
"Mrs. Miller made me and our classmates sit on the floor to eat our lunch. She said that we are animals and we got it from our country. ... I was hurt, and when I got to my class I told my teacher about what happened. I did not like what she said about my country."
Isac and other parents complained to the principal, Pauline Shakespeare. They claim that Shakespeare, who is black, tried to cover for Miller.
They also claim school officials tried to bribe the kids with ice cream to deny the incident happened!
An April 1 note written by one of the children, Ronald Destine, backs that claim:
"Today after questioning my friend and I for the fourth time, the principal [Mrs. Shakespeare] sent the guidance lady [Mrs. Gilbert] to get me in my classroom while I was reviewing math.
"When we got to her room, Mrs. Gilbert asked me what the school could do to have us change my story.
"I answered, nothing because I want the truth to come out! At this time, she offered free ice cream to us so we could say something else.
"I have a big math exam coming this month, and I would like for the principal to stop harassing my classmate and I. Please do something."
One wonders what on earth the assistant principal could possibly have had going through their head. Clearly, rational thought was not involved. Why would you punish an entire group of students for something most of them hadn't done? Why would you single them out on the basis of their ethnicity? Any educator with a functioning brain cell would have known that this was, or should be, career suicide.
And why in the name of heaven would any principal -- never mind a black one -- decide to cover for this reprehensible person? If she'd acted promptly to suspend and discipline her assistant principal pending investigation, there would have been a hue and cry, yes, but nothing like what happens once the coverup is discovered. And given how many students were wrongly punished, what sane person would think this could be covered up? Those kids would tell their parents about it as soon as they could, and any sensible person would know that.
There is, of course, the related matter of what precisely the children were supposed to learn from this event. Not, most assuredly, what they actually did learn, that people will accuse them and punish them based on who they are and not what they did; that people will then lie and cheat and try to force them to lie and cheat to cover up those actions; that all of the above is somehow something that's supposed to happen; that teachers and principals may not be worthy of trust. The principal and her assistant made their own jobs, and those of the teachers working at that school, measurably more difficult, and would have even if they'd gotten away with it all.
Of course, they still might. Most bureaucracies aren't quite equipped to deal with this level of stupidity.
Posted by iain at April 12, 2005 01:38 PM
