Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Mayor's Appointments to the Board

Text: 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