Chancellor Klein named in U.S. District Court complaint

December 31, 5:28 PMNY Education ExaminerLorri Giovinco-Harte

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the NY Education Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

ETA: coincidentally, the author mentioned in this post, who was one of the only reporters to discuss this case, was fired from the Village Voice.  He has been writing for them for over 30 years.

Nat Hentoff at The Village Voice reports that New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has been named in a civil rights complaint which was filed in U.S. District Court by the father of Stephen Cruz, the 11th-grade student who was allegedly attacked by a Safety Agent at Robert F. Kennedy Community High School in Flushing, Queens.

According to Hentoff, Chancellor Klein is named as a defendant in the complaint, along with Police Commissioner Kelly, the City of New York, and School Safety Agent Daniel O'Connell.

The complaint alleges brutality on the part of the Safety Agent as well a lack of accountability for such actions on the part of the DOE and Police Department. Allegedly, Safety Agent O'Connell attacked Cruz in a bathroom stall at the high school, leaving the young man with a bleeding head.  According to Hentoff, when the young man showed the agent his wound, the agent replied "That's life. It will stop bleeding."

Cruz was escorted to the principal's officer by a fellow student.  The principal explained that he could not discipline the agent because Safety Agents are under direct authority of the New York City Police Department.  Cruz's parents allege that the agent's direct supervisor, School Safety Agent Supervisor Anthony Pelosi , never showed up for a scheduled meeting to discuss the officer's actions.

Hentoff has some scathing commentary about the case and the Chancellor's involvement in it.  He writes:

I have reported often here on the documented abuses of students, and even some teachers, by the School Safety Agents deployed in this city's schools under Kelly, Klein, and Michael Bloomberg (the latter two praised around the country as champions of "school reform"). Since the 1950s, I've written in columns and books on our schools—and their chancellors from the worst to the best. But not until the Bloomberg/Klein regime have I seen such flagrant dereliction of accountability at the very top of the school system for frequent abuse of students by police agents.

Read more at The Village Voice.