A contentious Queens town hall with schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was dramatically shut down Thursday night after an impassioned parent demanded the floor to ask why his daughter was assaulted at her middle school.
“I wanted to ask how this happened,” the parent said after the meeting. The Daily News is withholding his name so as to not identify his daughter as an sex assault victim.
The meeting in Queens District 26 — which covers Bayside and Fresh Meadows — was meant in part to address a recent string of troubling incidents at Marie Curie Middle School. Those incidents a videotaped lunch room brawl and the alleged sexual assault.
The father of the sex assault victim said it took school officials more than a month to notify him of what happened.
“How is it possible for a boy in October to drop his pants in the band room, direct another boy to bring my daughter over, and then…they never notify us?” the parent said after the meeting.
“I’m sorry it happened,” he said of the meeting’s abrupt cancellation. “I just wanted to speak.”
The meeting’s organizers insisted they were sticking to a list of pre-submitted questions, provoking a vocal group of the chancellor’s critics to shout down the schools chief until meeting organizers pulled the plug on the event.
Parents and teachers packed the school auditorium at Nathaniel Hawthorne MS 74 to grill Carranza on a range of concerns.
Teachers said the mayhem at Marie Curie Middle School reflected their broader concerns about school discipline.
A member of the Community Education Council — a parent group that set up the meeting — read aloud an anonymous pre-written comment from a United Federation of Teachers union representative.
“We feel that staff is no longer respected or supported,” the comment read. It went on: “The lack of consequences and follow through as related to discipline has caused a lowering of morale and inability to effectively manage classes.”
City officials made a number of changes to the school discipline code last year, including making it more difficult to suspend students for longer than 20 days, and reducing the severity of consequences for some behaviors.
Carranza said the reforms, along with new investments in school social workers and social learning for students, are reducing suspensions and reported behavior incidents. Critics have contended that the numbers are dropping because teachers are not reporting some misbehavior.
