Newsday: Irate Haitian parents plan a protest
BY ELLEN YAN
STAFF WRITER
April 12, 2005

After a lunchroom squabble between two Haitian
students, a PS 34 administrator ordered 13 youngsters
from the Caribbean island to sit on the school floor
and eat their chicken and rice with their hands,
parents will allege during a protest at the Queens
Village school today.

"In Haiti, they treat you like animals and I will
treat you the same way here," parents said assistant
principal Nancy Miller screamed at the Haitians in
front of their schoolmates.

The alleged March 16 incident is fueling parents'
demands for Chancellor Joel Klein to fire Miller and
principal Pauline Shakespeare, who parents say backed
her administrator and who also allegedly told a
Haitian
parent that her child's behavior was like "animalism."
Miller and Shakespeare could not be reached late
yesterday for comment.

Ernsue Cayo, 11, said she started crying after a
classmate pushed her.

When Miller found out, she pointed to students in the
lunch line, saying "You. Sit right there." Ernsue and
her bilingual class of fourth- and fifth-graders were
allegedly told to sit on the floor.

"Eat with your hands," Ernsue said Miller told
students who wanted to get utensils. Some kids refused
to eat.

Roosevelt and Stanley Isec, brothers in the same
class, asked to sit on the bench, but Miller allegedly
told them no. "My friend said 'I don't want to sit on
the floor,'" Roosevelt, 10, said. "He was crying. She
said 'You have to sit on the floor because your class
was fighting.'"

With anger growing in the city's Haitian communities,
parents alleged that administrators tried bribing
students with sweets. "They tried to offer them ice
cream, Munchkins, everything to appease them, to say
it's not true," said Francia Devil, a Haitian
immigrant who has two children in the school and
helped organize the protest.

Klein spokesman Keith Kalb declined to say what
happened because the Department of Education is
investigating. "We are taking this very seriously," he
said.

In the three weeks since the alleged incident, no one
from the department has calmed parents or let them
know what will be done, said Henry Frank, executive
director of the Haitian Centers Council, a
Brooklyn-based advocacy group.

"The chancellor must explain why for so long he has
not done anything to correct that wrongdoing," Frank
said. "That person should not be at the school. It's
not good for the mental health of the children and it
is not good for the learning processes of the
children."
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.