VivirLatino

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

Read more…