Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The City's Activities With Respect to School Segregation

Text: 156 In contending that the City as well as the Board should be held liable for segregation in the Yonkers public schools, plaintiffs pointed to, inter alia, the interrelationship between housing segregation and school segregation, the City's control over school budgeting and plans, and the mayor's appointments to the Board of persons opposed to desegregative action. 157
158 In an effort to refute the contention that its actions in concentrating subsidized low-income housing in Southwest Yonkers had had the effect of enhancing school segregation, the City offered a study that concluded that if none of the subsidized housing projects in Southwest Yonkers had been built and each of the project sites had remained vacant, the racial balance in Southwest Yonkers's schools would not have differed significantly from the actual 1980-81 figures. In contrast, plaintiffs' expert testified that building low-income housing to be occupied principally by minority families tends to create a school that, while not necessarily showing an immediate dramatic increase in minority students, soon becomes identified as a minority school. Such an identification encourages resident white families to move out of the neighborhood and discourages other white families from moving in. 159 The relationship between schools and housing was hardly lost on the City while it was making its various decisions as to whether and where to construct subsidized housing. One Council member testified that nearly all of the East Yonkers councilmen had indicated that their constituents objected to subsidized low-income housing partly because [i]n order to keep the schools nice, you know, you'd have to keep out the minorities. Further, as described in the previous section, a common theme of East Yonkers residents' opposition to the Yonkers Plan for school desegregation was the desire to preserve the nature of our neighborhoods. As described in Part A.II.E.3. below, Mayor Martinelli explicitly opposed desegregation of the schools by busing in part because it would diminish the stability of the residential patterns. 160 There was also evidence that City officials had requested that the Board make several school attendance zone changes that would have enhanced segregation at the schools to be affected. For example, in 1974, Martinelli urged that a small nonminority area of a neighborhood be moved from the attendance zone of an elementary school that was 60% minority to one that was 88% white. A few months later a Council member suggested that several predominantly white blocks be redistricted from a school that was 28% minority to one that was 97% white. In 1976, another City official made a similar request at the behest of a landlord who had complained that his ability to attract tenants was detrimentally affected by the location of his property within the zone of a school that had a substantial minority enrollment. The Board declined to implement any of these requested changes.
161 Under state law, the Yonkers school district is fiscally dependent upon the City, and the Board's annual budget is subject to approval, line by line, by the Council. N.Y.Educ.Law Sec. 2576 (McKinney 1981). Because of the Council's fiscal control over the Board, in the public mind there [were] two boards of education actually operating, with citizens often looking directly to the Council in school matters. There was no evidence, however, that the Council in any particular instance disapproved a school budget that included a desegregation plan; there could be no such evidence because the Board never sought to implement a plan that had any significant desegregative elements. 162 The Board's willingness to put specific proposals before the Council was not constrained solely by fiscal considerations. For example, in 1973, the superintendent recommended to the Board, and the Board submitted to the Council, recommendations for vocational program modifications that were more expensive than the pairing-and-sharing proposal of the NYU Report. Both the East Yonkers community and a number of Council members had publicly opposed the NYU Report's recommendation. The Board's spurning of the less expensive NYU proposals was influenced by the perceived infeasibility of obtaining City Council approval. 624 F.Supp. at 1506. Similarly, in the Phase II proposals, the school closings and the state's substantial subsidization of transportation costs would have resulted in a net reduction of the school system's annual expenditures, and fiscal concerns thus could not explain the Board's rejection of those proposals. As a practical matter, however, East Yonkers community opposition to Phase II was strong, Council members and the mayor had publicly expressed their opposition, and the Board always had an eye on what was politically, not just fiscally, feasible. As one Board official put it, we, in essence, had to convince another series of people, most of whom were elected by the community, and to the extent that the community resisted the idea, any idea, it seems to me that that would have some impact upon the people who owed election to those same individuals. 163 The City's influence on the Board was also visible in certain decisions as to school sites and configurations. For example, in the late 1960's the Board commenced plans for School 10, which it intended to open as an integrated elementary school in Southwest Yonkers, drawing students from School 3 (then 34% minority), School 19 (then 68% minority), and School 27 (then 5% minority). Planned as an experiment in the open school concept, in which the interior space would be flexible, unstructured, and without walls, the building was to be located on a five-acre site having a general openness of environment harmonious with the openness to be found within. As eventually constructed, however, School 10 was a mean and inadequate ghetto school, due largely to changes urged by the City which the Board grudgingly felt compelled to accept. 164 Without recounting the many events that occurred en route to the birth of School 10, which are described in detail in the district court's opinion, 624 F.Supp. at 1403-10 and 1542-43, suffice it to say that first, the Board agreed to change its preferred site to one in the middle of an urban renewal project (in order to allow the City to use the construction of School 10 as a statutorily permitted noncash contribution to the urban renewal area); later it accepted a one-acre site instead of the originally approved five acres (because the City decided to erect additional apartments on part of the site); as the site was developed, the front of the school could not be seen from the street (because the City wanted that frontage for an apartment-retail-store complex); and in the end, the school had virtually no outdoor recreation area (because the City needed more garage space for apartment residents). Though the Board objected to the City's inroads into the School 10 facilities, it eventually capitulated to each demand. 165 Because of its location behind other buildings and its lack of outdoor play area, School 10 became known as the airshaft school and was characterized immediately as a new ghetto school. By 1980, it had the fourth largest minority percentage enrollment in the City.
166 Although the Board was an independent municipal corporation under state law, its nine members were appointed by the mayor. Prior to the election of Mayor Martinelli, many Board members served more than one term, frequently being reappointed by a mayor other than the one who had originally appointed them. In the 25 years just prior to the advent of Martinelli, two-thirds of the Board's 33 members had been reappointed by a successor mayor. In 1973, after HUD had made clear that further federal funds for housing would be withheld unless the City allowed low-income housing to be constructed outside of Southwest, Martinelli won election on a campaign platform that included a promise that no more subsidized housing would be constructed in Yonkers. Once in office, Martinelli, who opposed busing and favored the policy of neighborhood schools, set out to appoint members based on his philosophy of education, so that it would be his Board. He did not reappoint a single person who was serving on the Board at the time he was elected. Many of his appointments were controversial. 167 His first appointment, in 1974, was Angelo Paradiso, who had been the principal at Saunders from 1964 to 1973. Paradiso had resigned in 1973 after a dispute with Alioto concerning the Saunders screening process and Paradiso's unwillingness to address the problem of disproportionately low numbers of minority students at the school and what Alioto perceived as the systematic exclusion of minorities. 168 In 1975, Martinelli appointed as Board members Morton Wekstein and Anne Bocik. Wekstein was the Mayor's personal attorney, and his appointment drew criticism in part because Wekstein's law partner was then representing a number of school administrators who had been considered ineffective by Alioto. A year later, Wekstein resigned because of a conflict of interest. 169 Bocik was a former teacher and elementary school principal who had retired in 1974 after Alioto requested her resignation. As a principal, Bocik had vowed that there would never be a full-time minority teacher of academic subjects in her school; she had received unfavorable job evaluations because of her ineffectiveness in planning and her common use of racial slurs and other racially insensitive behavior toward minority students. Bocik's treatment of minority students in this manner had been the subject of complaints to school administrators from both minority and white teachers; at trial, one teacher described in detail incidents in which Bocik terrorized or humiliated minority students, used racial epithets in referring to minority children, described them as animalistic, and threatened to buy bleach, Clorox, Purex to bleach them, their skins, because perhaps that would improve their behavior. Soon after Bocik's forced retirement, a state senator wrote Martinelli, recommending that she be appointed to the Board based on her experience and her Slavic background; her appointment was supported by the United Slavonian American League. It was opposed by the Board's president, by Alioto, and by community members, especially from the minority community. Martinelli appointed Bocik to the Board and defended the appointment by reference to her ethnic background. 170 The mayor made several appointments in 1976. First, after Wekstein resigned, Martinelli was asked to consider appointing an hispanic to the Board. Notwithstanding his recent justification of the Bocik appointment on grounds of her ethnicity, he responded by stating that his appointment would be based on the quality of the individual irregardless [sic ] of racial background. He appointed to the recently vacated seat a white realtor from Northeast Yonkers. 171 In the same year, the mayor replaced two Board members who had been movers behind the Task Force and were generally regarded as being among the Board's strongest advocates of school desegregation in Yonkers. Both members had expressed their interest in continuing to serve on the Board, and the reappointment of one or both was supported by the Council of PTAs, the Yonkers NAACP, the new superintendent Robitaille, and the Clergy of Yonkers. Martinelli appointed instead John Romano, a candidate supported by the Congress of Italian-American Organizations, and Joseph Spencer, a supporter of the mayor in his previous election campaigns. Once on the Board, Romano and Spencer promptly voted against even applying for state funding for the Task Force; Romano opined that state funding was a waste[ ] because Yonkers has no racial problem.... unless the state hands down a ruling stating there is a problem. 172 By the time of the 1977 Phase II proposal, Martinelli was routinely quizzing prospective Board members about their views on busing; he admitted at trial that these views probably weighed very heavily with [him] in deciding whether or not to appoint. In 1977 and 1978, Martinelli appointed four persons, all of whom were opposed to the Phase II Plan. They included Quentin Hicks, a black opposed to busing, whose appointment was immediately protested by members of the black community on the ground that his views did not represent theirs; the appointment was later acknowledged by the mayor to have been an embarrassment to the black community. 173 By May 1978, the Board was composed solely of Martinelli's appointees. In that month, the Board held a special workshop at which Board members unanimously expressed their opposition to the desegregation proposals of Phase II. As indicated in part A.II.D.2. above, the Board neither accepted any desegregative aspect of these proposals nor took any other steps, including those it avowedly preferred, toward desegregating the Yonkers public schools. 174 In 1979, Martinelli lost his bid for reelection. In his valedictory State-of-the-City address, he began his description of his administration's achievements in education by stating that [d]iscussion of neighborhood stability would not be complete without attention to our public school system. After mentioning three factors that he predicted would ensure sound and healthy schools, he stated, [m]ost importantly, we now have a Board of Education fully committed to neighborhood schools which is of critical importance to neighborhood stability in this city! 175