By DeWayne Murreld, father of a high school junior and a Senior Parent Organizer for StudentsFirstNY, a leading education reform organization.
This past week, I waited over two hours at Mayor de Blasio’s town hall in Brownsville to ask an important question about my son’s school. For kids in our neighborhood, a quality education can mean the difference between life or death. So I would have waited all night to get a straight answer from the Mayor. But when I finally got to the microphone, I could barely get my question out before he dismissed me. I asked the Mayor to make a commitment that he wouldn’t send unwanted teachers into classrooms at my son’s school, but Mayor de Blasio made it clear that kids in our neighborhood aren’t his priority.
Instead of listening to our concerns, the Mayor defended his plan to put unwanted teachers back into classrooms. Right now, there are close to 800 of these unwanted teachers. They’re not assigned to full-time positions because no principal wants to hire them, but the Mayor is “solving” that problem by forcing principals to take them anyway.
Read the full oped in King County Politics.
