HAMILTON: Bianco, Pridgen and Weller need to see the principal

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June 11, 2009

By Ken Hamilton The Niagara Gazette Thu Jun 11, 2009, 07:49 PM EDT

Lewiston-Porter school board president Robert Weller has been sending racist and sexist e-mails for friends and colleagues, and seemingly doesn’t truly understand what is wrong with doing so. Former Buffalo school board member the Rev. Darius Pridgen, a community-activist preacher, planned on bringing members of his True Bethel Baptist Church, located on Buffalo’s eastside, northward to Lewiston to protest Weller’s actions, unless Weller apologizes for those e-mails.

Any reasonable person would find a school board president doing such to be reprehensible, and Pridgen is right to be indignant; however, I am uncomfortable with this one on many fronts.

It is unlikely that a whole lot of True Bethel’s members know where Lewiston is, or have ever been there. Business First Magazine has rated Lewiston-Porter school district as the 11th of the 97 districts in Western New York. As racist or sexist as their school board president may seem to be, the black kids — as few as there are — and the white female students are getting a good education and can one day either escape Lewiston’s prosperity and create greater prosperity elsewhere.

But the magazine has rated Buffalo’s school district, even after Pridgen’s stint on the board, as once again the worst in Western New York; and because their school board president hasn’t sent any racist or sexist e-mails to their friends and colleagues, no one seems to be protesting that?

While someone should be up in arms about Weller, it is not Pridgen or True Bethel: it is the few black parents that send their children to that school district and the many white parents who send their daughters there.

But while Weller is sending his e-mails that suggests that black men don’t want to work, Chelsea Clinton being upset that her mother was getting beaten by a black man (Obama), and that women are supposed to take a subservient role to men and be in the kitchen cooking all of the time, their school board still see their students as “the apple of their eye.”

Not so in Niagara Falls. Business First rated the Niagara Falls School District at only 5-points above Buffalo’s at the 92nd position. That is 81 points behind Weller and his Lew-Port district. Eighty-one!!! And as Lew-Port is actually educating their “apples,” because that is what a school district is supposed to be doing, Niagara Falls schools superintendent Cynthia Bianco defended the district’s poor showing by saying that the magazine is comparing “apples to oranges.”

Apples to oranges!!!

As Weller was sending bigoted e-mails to his friends and colleagues, Bianco was telegraphing to the world that the kids in Niagara Falls were somehow different and learning impaired. Apples to oranges in this case sounds more like she‘s really trying to say, ‘marshmallows to chocolate chips.’ What is she saying that is different than what Weller is doing?

E-mail to Bianco, let me school you on something — and this is no joke — they are all kids, all of them, and they can all learn. And some of the schools in the district are doing a pretty good job teaching them. Geraldine J. Mann Elementary School finished a respectable 66 out of the region’s 292 elementary schools. Henry Kalfas, 79th and Hyde Park schools finished ahead of Prince of Peace and while not great Niagara Street and Harry F. Abate finished at least 55 points from the bottom. Our new state-of-the-art high school, a model for the rest of the state, finished 117 out of 131 high schools.

Perhaps, right after Pridgen finishes making Weller apologize (and well he should), and protesting the poor results that his Buffalo school district is getting, he can come back to Niagara Falls and organize a protest of our unapologetic school superintendent, who apparently believes that the poor, dumb, kids in her district can produce no better results than are the grades on her stalled and segregating HOPE-VI Project. One may actually keep the other exactly where they are.

Here’s a simple principle of education. For the most part, kids do what you expect them to do. If Lew-Port is able to provide an excellent education to prepare its children to expand their prosperity, even though its board president is sending bigoted e-mails to friends and colleagues, then perhaps our board and superintendent should come straight out and send bigoted e-mails to each other, rather than saying that our kids are different from other kids, then under-educating and sending them into a posh, public housing projects, unable to escape their poverty.

Perhaps Bianco, Pridgen and Weller all need to go see the principal.

Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. Contact him at kenhamilton930@aol.com.

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