As Cultures Clash, Brooklyn Principal Faces Assault Charges
Update: Robert Segarra, the P.S. 20 teacher’s union rep and kindergarten teacher whom Principal Sean Keaton is accused of assaulting last month, has filed a notice of claim of his intent to sue the city, the DOE and Mr. Keaton for civil damages, Mr. Segarra’s lawyer, Howard Tanner, said today.
The claim, filed last Friday the 12th, accuses the city of negligent hiring and retention, failure to properly train and supervise Mr. Keaton and failure to provide a safe work environment.
“They had notice that this guy was dangerous and they kept him on,” Mr. Tanner said. “He’s attacked other people and he’s threatened other people.”
By Andy Newman
On Monday morning, the fifth graders of Public School 20 in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, formed a sea of gold and maroon caps and gowns in the sanctuary of a nearby church. They sang a Miley Cyrus song, heard a speech from their 11-year-old valedictorian, reaped awards.
Missing from the graduation festivities, though, was the school’s principal, who during four years had won admirers for improving test scores, starting a host of cultural programs and taking troubled students under his wing. Though the graduating class had invited him to speak, education officials would not allow it.
The principal, Sean Keaton, 38, was removed from the school last month, accused of repeatedly punching and kicking a teacher’s union representative during a meeting. On Thursday, while the rest of P.S. 20 savored the bittersweet joys of the last full day of school, Mr. Keaton was arraigned in court on assault charges.
Not all of the parents were sad to see Mr. Keaton go. His arrest capped years of growing rancor over the school’s direction and his often prickly leadership style, much of which precipitated in the crucible of neighborhood and school-related blogs, where Mr. Keaton himself sometimes joined the conversation. And dire as it is, the situation at P.S. 20 is a version of a conflict playing out in schools in gentrifying neighborhoods all over the city, particularly Brooklyn.
In the resurgent brownstone bastions of Fort Greene, Boerum Hill and the fringes of Park Slope, affluent parents with one set of expectations for their children’s education — progressive, hands-on, emphasizing freedom — are clashing with longtime, working-class residents who prefer stricter, more structured educational models like the one Mr. Keaton favored, leaving principals caught in the crossfire.
“It’s going to be really hard to find principals who can serve the different families that make up their population and can still keep the lights on,” said Pamela Wheaton, the director of insideschools.org, an independent site about the city’s public schools.
At P.S. 20, some of the conflict has been tinged with race: Mr. Keaton is black, as are three-quarters of the students, while many of the families who said they found him hard to work with are white. Much of it has to do with class. Some comes down to personal style: Even many of Mr. Keaton’s supporters say he can be abrasive and inclined to escalate rather than defuse tensions.
But the result has been a school community divided and a principal who seemed to feel besieged. Mr. Keaton, who has declined to be interviewed since his arrest, told a group of parents on a school tour last fall when asked what he envisioned for the school if money were no object, “Quite honestly, I’m all out of ideas for this school.”
Mr. Keaton, a tall slender man with a master’s degree from City College, was named principal in 2005 after seven years as a teacher and assistant principal at the school, a large brick box set among town houses on Adelphi Street.
Ms. Wheaton, of insideschools.org, said that when she met with Mr. Keaton early in his tenure, “He said: ‘I look out the window and I see parents walking by the school. Why is that? They should come in and take a look and give us a chance.’ ”
Some of them did. Dara Furlow, a magazine marketer, wrote an article in early 2007 for a local magazine, The Hill, about her search for a school. At P.S. 20, she wrote, she was “amazed by the small class size, large airy classrooms, orderly hallways covered with children’s art, the computer lab and the science room with its spacious greenhouse” and “particularly impressed with the young, ambitious principal.”
In 2007, enrollment at the school rose for the first time in more than a decade. Scores on standardized tests increased, too, though roughly in line with the overall improvement in District 13, which includes Fort Greene.
But tensions were growing. The approach to the children that some parents found firm and fatherly others deemed tyrannical and abusive. Many parents said that the more they tried to get involved in the daily life of the school, the more Mr. Keaton resisted and seemed to resent their efforts and presence.
The P.T.A., of which Ms. Furlow was then president, complained in 2007 that Mr. Keaton refused to give it a copy of the school budget, though the Education Department said that principals were not then required to share the documents the P.T.A. had requested. Parents of children in the younger grades said they were blocked — sometimes physically, by Mr. Keaton — from walking their children to class in the morning. Mr. Keaton also shut down a “parent room” at the school, where parents could meet during the day. One of the mainstays of the parent room, Cynthia Howell, the mother of a third grader, said Mr. Keaton barred her from entering the building.
Around this time, the Education Department’s chief parent engagement officer, Martine G. Guerrier, met with a group of P.S. 20 parents and Mr. Keaton to try to smooth out relations.
Although Mr. Keaton retained — and still retains — the support of most of the school’s families, Ms. Furlow and other disillusioned parents began transferring their children.
“My child had wonderful teachers,” Ms. Furlow wrote to a New York Times blog, the Local. “But Mr. Keaton’s unwillingness to admit deficiencies and work for positive change collaboratively with parents made it impossible for us to stay.”
For the 2008-9 school year, enrollment dropped 9 percent, to 399. A few blocks away, meanwhile, buzz was growing about P.S. 11, a growing school where the principal was perceived as welcoming parents of all educational philosophies.
Then, in March, the city announced that one of its three new citywide gifted-and-talented programs would be at P.S. 20. This ostensible good news set off more criticism on the blogs, of Mr. Keaton and of the city’s decision.
In April, Mr. Keaton posted a letter to the “Fort Greene Community” on The Local. He listed goals he had met, including raising test scores and forming partnerships with community institutions. But he also talked about the toll the turmoil was taking. He noted that a commenter on one Internet board had called him “Principal Mugabe.”
“My feelings have been bruised and I have been offended and threatened by many people in my school community but I never complain,” he wrote. “I wonder what it feels like to receive support in the areas of grant writing, parent newsletters, real fund-raising, enrichment, Web site design and team building like some of my colleagues in our school districts.”
He offered to meet with his critics, then withdrew the invitation. In an interview on April 21, he said of the new wave of parents : “I’ve never understood what parents wanted, except to be able to come in when they want, to come in and sit in the classroom. And you can’t do that in Park Slope, you can’t do it on the Upper West Side, nor on the Upper East Side. Why should you be able to do that at P.S. 20?”
On May 21, Mr. Keaton summoned a special education teacher to his office to discuss an allegation that she had used corporal punishment on a student. Robert Segarra, a union representative and kindergarten teacher at the school, came as her advocate.
Mr. Segarra said that at one point, Mr. Keaton began poking him and, when Mr. Segarra would not back down, hitting him. Mr. Segarra, 49, said he never lifted a finger as Mr. Keaton punched him to the ground and hit or kicked him at least 20 times.
Mr. Segarra had bruises on his neck, head and arms. The police said a stomp print on his head matched the tread of Mr. Keaton’s shoe.
Mr. Keaton’s lawyer, Richard F. X. Guay, who entered a not-guilty plea on Mr. Keaton’s behalf in criminal court on Thursday, said that his client was “presumed innocent by law” and “eager to be vindicated in our justice system.”
The Department of Education reassigned Mr. Keaton to administrative duties at another location, pending the outcome of his case.
On Monday, in front of the Emmanuel Baptist Church, where the graduation was held, Mr. Keaton’s supporters remained steadfast. “He’s straightforward and he pulls no punches,” said Kassim Sykes, 34, a delivery driver and the parent of a graduating fifth grader. “He gives it to you in the raw, and I respect that.”
Other parents agreed. “He should have been there,” said Marisia Rivera, a former member of the P.T.A. “When his name came up, all the kids turned around. They expected him to pop in any second.”
At a bus stop around the corner, though, Ms. Rivera, 41, an aircraft cleaner, offered a more balanced assessment. “When it comes to the kids, he’s No. 1,” she said. “But he can be evil. When you see too much of what goes on in the school, that’s when he doesn’t want you around. If he thinks you’re trying to bring him down, he’ll bring you down first.”
Whether or not Mr. Keaton returns to P.S. 20 in September, the new gifted program will not be there. The Education Department canceled it for the school last week. “We were getting indications that many parents would not accept their assignments to P.S. 20,” said Andrew Jacob, a department spokesman. “There wasn’t enough parent demand to open the program.”
— Andy Newman
New York Times
2009-06-27
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/nyregion/27principal.html?tntemail1=y&_r=1&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
