Editorial/Opinion ....................Pages 12,13 Education

Recent school shooting brings school safety to the forefront

By STEPHON JOHNSON

Amsterdam News Staff

Here we go again.

Another gun control debate has spawned after the recent school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The good guy with a gun vs. the bad guy with a gun. Arming teachers who have already protested over a lack of school supplies and are being criticized for allegedly teaching critical race theory.

So how is the teacher’s union handling the situation? Battling legislation.

A spokesperson for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) said that UFT retirees in Florida and Pennsylvania target federal legislators to demand “rational gun control.” They will mobilize union members to press for gun control and safety here in New York City and New York State and help as much as they can nationwide.

“UFT members are joining national protests—this Friday wear orange, as part of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and marching with students as part of the national June 11 March for Our Lives protest in NYC and in D.C.,” said the UFT spokesperson.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ solution to the school safety issue? More law enforcement.

“And yes, during the campaign trail, I was mocked over and over again by my video of examining backpacks,” said Adams during a recent news conference. “How dare Eric talk about examining backpacks? Looking in the rooms of your children, so if you see AK-47s, something is wrong. If you see boxes of bullets, something is wrong. Yes. Should we have to do that? No, we should not. But we have to stop living life the way it ought to be and live life the way it is. Guns are in the hands of our children.”

“Lives” is the word of the day, the week and the month for local organizations such as the student-led Urban Youth Collaborative (UYC) who are currently in Albany pushing for legislation that would replace punitive sentences with “restorative justice” in schools.

A spokesperson for the UYC pointed to a statement made on social media to explain the activist group’s stance on the latest shooting.

“Our hearts are breaking with the news from Uvalde,” read their statement on Twitter. “Schools should be a safe place for ALL children. Yet now, when students are already scared, the heavy police presence many politicians are calling for will be MORE traumatizing and make students LESS safe.”

Smitha Varghese, the New York campaign coordinator the Alliance for Quality, added to the idea that more cops isn’t the solution considering the actions of police in Uvalde. “Since many of the marginalized people in New York come from communities that are police and have no idea what safety

could look like beyond policing because it’s their communities that are policed,” said Varghese. “So a lot of our parents are, like, literally the Black and Brown mothers who live in these communities. And so there’s a lot of unlearning when it comes to, you know, what really means safety in our schools. So we make space for those conversations, and you know, we’re ultimately supporting the youth. It’s the youth who are demanding cops out of schools.”

“We have caring adults in all of our buildings who have the resources to help our kids when they’re down,” said New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks. “Every school at the very least has a school social worker, a counselor. Or some schools have a school based mental health center. And you know what

every school has? Every school has caring teachers and principals. There are caring adults in all of our schools. We have to let them know when you see something that just looks wrong.”

But what does he mean by “looks wrong?”

“I grew up in New York City. I’m a child of immigrants, came from a low income family. And I was CUNY as well,” stated Varghese. “So, you know, I was suspended in high school. I went to a school that was largely Black and Brown and Jamaica, Queens. And I was suspended because a student hit me. We were both suspended and she was entered into the carceral system, because after the suspension, the school called me back, and they wanted to identify the young woman. They had these pictures and identify them with the police with like actual NYPD.

“She ended up going to juvie. And I think about that now, and I’m like, ‘That was like a violent interaction and nothing was solved,’” continued Varghese. “Like our city is not solving any of the problems at all.”

But all issues don’t exist in a vacuum.

The New York State legislature tacked on another issue with gun rights, believing that the shooting and the lack of access to improving their situation are one and the same. This week, the New York State Senate passed the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York and asked for the State Assembly to pass the law on June 2. It’s the state’s attempt to re-install elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 post-2013’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder. This includes protection against voter intimidation, providing help for those whose first language isn’t English, and access to the tools that’ll help them in court should cases arise.

One activist felt that it was necessary to help the community with actions instead of pontification.

“In the wake of the white supremacist shooting in Buffalo, we applaud the New York legislature for continuing to work to give Black communities what we truly need—not thoughts and prayers, but the power to ensure government is responsive to our needs,” stated Karen Wharton, Democracy Coalition coordinator for Citizen Action of New York. “Power at the local level determines how our youth are educated, and the NYVRA will help Black and Brown communities get fair representation on school boards, city councils, and more.”

To State GOP Chair Nick Langworthy, this is just another way for Democrats to get in the way of the freedoms Americans hold dear and turn attention away from the issue at hand. He believes that the problem resides elsewhere.

“In typical Albany fashion, Kathy Hochul is following in the footsteps of her mentor, Andrew Cuomo, and focused on making cheap headlines for her primary…,” said Langworthy in an emailed statement. “Case in point: the Domestic Terrorism Task Force that was established and hasn’t even met once since its creation more than two years since its establishment.

“This package of bills does nothing to actually address the underlying mental health crisis at the center of the problem nor does it invest in securing our schools. If Hochul and legislative leaders cared about shooting victims, they would vote today to repeal their disastrous bail laws that have turned our streets over to violent criminals.”

Local teachers, students and elected officials are stuck on how to keep children safe from school shooters. (Photos courtesy of WoodysPhotos, WDNet (both via iStock))

a moral, economic and political crisis. There were 140 million people who were poor or one emergency away from economic ruin before the pandemic. Since March 2020, while hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions are on the edge of hunger and eviction, and still without health care or living wages, billionaire wealth has grown by over $2 trillion.”

The June 18 march will “be a generationally transformative declaration of the power of poor and low-wealth people and our moral allies to say that this system is killing all of us and we can’t…we won’t…WE REFUSE TO BE SILENT ANYMORE.”

“Generationally transformative” is a great way to describe what the Rev. Barber and the 6/18 organizers plan to accomplish.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s August 1963 March on Washington— when a racial rainbow of protestors from across the country and world demanded an end to segregation, the payment of fair wages, voting and civil rights, job training and access to education and economic justice— was generationally transformative and ushered in tremendous progress for our nation.

One year later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to discriminate against someone because of their race, color, religion, sex or ethnicity. It was the first of several laws that truly changed America by allowing people of color to live, work, and define their lives “not by the color of their skin but the content of their character,” to borrow Dr. King’s historic words.

But when you look at what we’ll be marching against on June 18, it’s like we’re back in 1963. We live in a country that has been blinding itself to how far the billionaire class and rightwing, racist extremists are willing to go to rid our country of the labor and civil rights protections that were hard won from decades of struggle.

Today, their singular persistence to roll back progress has essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights protections, stacked the courts with ideologues, put women on the precipice of losing their reproductive freedom, and even made it illegal in places to give someone waiting in line to vote a drink of water.

The constant string of mass shootings across the country, the rise of white extremist groups promoting gun violence and the stupid idea that equality for non-white people threatens Western civilization—the so-called ‘great replacement theory’ pushed by so many conservative commentators—make it clear that we would do well to follow another tactic Dr. King used so well in 1963— coalition building.

Backed by labor unions, religious organizations, sororities and fraternities, the ‘63 march brought a racially diverse group to the Capitol grounds to demand all Americans enjoy the same basic rights. Look at the pictures and videotapes. The ‘63 March on Washington showed the world the real face of America in all its beautiful variety and diversity.

That collective resolve made it impossible for political leaders to deny their demands. And that’s what we need for June 18, a multiracial, multiethnic crowd, the true face of America, marching to demand that our elected leaders do much more to curb white supremist groups, fix our broken economy, and guarantee all Americans enjoy the principle for which Dr. King gave his life: equality.

So come be a part of history and join the June 18 Mass Poor People’s & LowWage Workers’ Assembly & Moral March on Washington.

Help transform our nation.

Join us.

George Gresham is president of 1199SEIU, the nation’s largest healthcare union representing 450,000 members in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, and the District of Columbia.

St. Nicholas Park

Continued from page 12

out proper maintenance only compounds the spread. Our volunteers can do a lot, but we cannot operate lawn mowers in city parks.

On the campaign trail, Mayor Eric Adams committed to 1% for Parks by signing onto New Yorkers for Parks’ Five Point Plan for Park Equity, and it appeared that hope was coming for St. Nicholas. But his preliminary budget fell well short of this commitment, allocating only .6%—which lags far behind other cities across the country that dedicate closer to 2% of their budgets to Parks funding.

Further compounding this issue is the city’s inability to efficiently spend the money it has for critical social infrastructure like parks and open spaces through its capital process. It takes far too long, and costs more than it should to build and make the repairs that our parks desperately need, resulting in nearly $6 billion in unmet capital needs alone. Reforms are long overdue to address the existing maintenance backlogs and streamline this process.

We have vital capital needs at St. Nicholas Park that haven’t been funded at all, including a playground that desperately needs renovation and lacks safe fencing, inadequate amounts of equipment storage on-site and a closed main staircase that has not been repaired for more than 10 years.

As we head into another warm summer and peak parks’ season, without 1% funding for Parks or capital process reform, our parks and open spaces will continue to fall into further disrepair. The funding gap is felt most acutely in communities like ours, which lack the extensive private funding that supports parks in wealthier areas of the city. These commitments by Mayor Adams and the City Council will ensure the basic needs and maintenance of St. Nicholas are met and allow our community’s vital resource to flourish.

We cannot let this crisis compound even further and must stop depending on the good will of community residents, local groups and outside funding for a solvable, policy-based problem that starts with our local government.

St. Nicholas Park and other parks across the five boroughs can become clean, accessible and safe places that all New Yorkers deserve if our city meets its obligation to fund them as the critical social infrastructure they are for our neighborhoods.

DON’T PLAY WITH FIRE.

IF YOU SMOKED, GET SCANNED.

Karen Asner is a lawyer and member of Friends of St. Nicholas Park.

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