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South Bronx Educator Banned for Helping Students Protect Their Rights

11:25 H | Topics: Activism - Education - Justice - New York City

Many NYC schools look and feel more like institutions of detention instead of institutions of learning. One South Bronx, NYC educator has now been banned from a high school because he aided students protesting random searches by school safety officers who are actually part of the NYC police department.

Karim Lopez, the program coordinator of a non-DOE community agency, had helped the young people try to organize their refusal action, and also invited the NYCLU to come to the school to observe the more-than forty agents and three metal detectors in operation in the school’s lunchroom. Even though the visitors and Mr. Lopez were told to enter the building through the scanning machines, according to the directives of the NYPD agents, once the supervising officers discovered who and what they were, they immediately escorted them out of the lunchroom. Mr. Lopez was questioned and then taken into what they referred to as a “holding room,”(really just the dean’s office) and held for more than an hour. The NYCLU staff were thrown out of the building, and were once again told to leave by six officers when they continued trying to take photographs from across the street. By that afternoon, Eric Nadelstern, the CEO of the Office of Empowerment Schools, had demanded that Mr. Lopez be removed from the school building and not allowed to return

Lopez has been at the forefront of community empowerment in the South Bronx working on projects as varied as internships for young people to helping create, sustain, and protect community gardening projects.

Although it is written in the School Chancellor’s Regulations that students have the right to be refuse to be searched and remain in school, when one student tried to exercise his right, he was taken to the side, surrounded by up to five NYPD School Safety Agents, and questioned and intimidated into going along with it. Another pair of teenaged boys was brought into a side room and questioned, at times without any adult present, about their idea to refuse and who had put them up to it. They were threatened with a week’s suspension if they did not agree to the search. For fear of jeopardizing their college careers, the students finally gave in.

While many reports focus on the problem of high school drop out rates among Latinos (who make up the majority of the South Bronx population) no one looks at how money is being spent in schools for security rather than books. If your school felt more like jail than a place for learning would you be inspired to attend daily?

The community is planning a rally in support of Lopez and in support of students exercising their rights on Thursday at 4:30 pm in front of the Tweed Courthouse, 52 Chambers Street, in downtown Manhattan. For more information visit Friends of Brook Park.

Image and story via / Friends of Brook Park

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