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Overcast Flag issue, discrimination claim causes community rift at East Rockaway board meeting
Standing before the East Rockaway Board of Education on March 22, Lucy Pozo fought back tears, telling the board that it had “failed me, and I’m glad to be graduating in three months’ time.”
The East Rockaway High School senior’s complaint stems from an incident March 22 at Sports Night, when some students waved a Donald Trump flag and posed with it for photos. Pozo said she and others were made uncomfortable by the flag, and added that she had been bullied for being Hispanic by some of her peers in the past.
“East Rockaway schools have failed me,” she said. “That flag, the reason nobody was talking about it that day, is because we’re scared.”
The flag, and its appearance at the school’s event, had sparked both positive and negative reaction in the community.
After the meeting, Superintendent Lisa Ruiz wrote in an email to the Herald that the board takes discrimination seriously, and that officials had contacted Pozo and her family.
“The district is investigating the claims,” Ruiz wrote. “I applaud the student’s bravery in speaking publicly on her experiences and hope this is a learning opportunity to work toward positive change as a district and community.”
During board member comments at the meeting, Trustee Dom Vulpis said he needed time to review the issues that were presented.
“When I see a student come up and say the school district has failed them, I don’t know what to say,” Vulpis said. “I need time to process. I will process that. When we listen to the community, that’s when the board is most effective.”
Reached on Monday, Vulpis declined to comment further.
At the board meeting, Frank Passanisi said he was outraged because although his children and nephews did not bring the flag to the event, they posed with it, and their picture was then posted into a community Facebook page without his consent. He described that as an attack on his family.
“During the course of the night, there was a political flag brought in by a student, not my children,” he said. “At the end of the night, when all was said and done and people were leaving the school, my kids and my nephews got together for a picture with this flag.”
It’s against school policy to promote a political candidate without consent from the board, Ruiz later wrote in a letter to parents. No permission was given for the Trump flag.
Passanisi’s sister, Dena Arnold, said the board wrote the letter without asking her children what happened, and that she and her brother’s children were vilified by other parents.
“They weren’t committing a crime,” she said. “They were standing side-by-side smiling and holding a flag. What exactly were they looking to gain by taking their identity? My children are just like anyone else’s children. They have dreams, wants, choices and opinions. We as Americans have these rights, who are you to silence them?”
Dineen Cillufo said she believes every parent reacted irrationally to the incident, and that the district needs a clearer stance on what constitutes political advertising.
“Everything we do in our school district is political,” she said. “All the mandates handed down from Albany are political. The kids had no idea that this was going to be divisive. This is on the parents, and maybe if parents — all of us — learn to keep our mouth shut, we can come together as a community.”
But many other members of the community saw it differently. Former school board Trustee Keith Gamache said that those who believe the board is indifferent to the mental health of students were wrong, citing its emphasis in recent years on providing counseling services for all students.
His wife, Michelle Gamache, read a letter to the board from Jennifer Racanelli Cuthbert, who graduated in 1992.
“There is simply no place for political campaigning in our public schools,” she wrote. Jonathan Meneses, who graduated in 2007, said Sports Night and Rock Rivalry fostered some of his favorite memories in the community, which would have been “tarnished” had politics been brought in.
“Some of my formative years happened within these walls,” he said. “As a resident and as a parent of a child coming to school age, I look at what happened during Sports Night and simply just cringe. Where has the district gone since I left many years ago?”
While the board members mostly declined to address the issues brought up by parents and the student publicly, President Kristen O’Hagan called for parents to prioritize the students.
“We were always such a close-knit community and we need to go back to that,” she said. “It starts with the adults. We need to do better, and we need to remember this is for the kids, everything we do, it’s about our children.”
