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NY Times, Sept. 1 2017
Principal in Park Slope is Cleared of Communist Organizing
By KATE TAYLOR
Jill Bloomberg, the principal of Park Slope Collegiate, in May. She has
been cleared of a charge she tried to recruit students to the
Progressive Labor Party. Credit Mark Kauzlarich for The New York Times
A Brooklyn principal who was accused of Communist organizing has been
cleared of that charge by the city’s education department, while being
found guilty of several minor policy violations, a spokesman for the
department said on Thursday.
Jill Bloomberg, the principal of Park Slope Collegiate, a middle and
high school, has been an outspoken critic of the city’s education
department, particularly on issues of racial segregation and
discrimination. In January, she complained to the department about what
she said was racism and segregation within the school sports program,
citing the uneven distribution of teams among the schools that share a
building with Park Slope Collegiate.
Soon after, she learned that the department’s Office of Special
Investigations was investigating an allegation that she had tried to
recruit students to join the Progressive Labor Party. In April, she sued
the department, seeking to stop the investigation and accusing the
department of retaliating against her for her activism on matters of
race. She lost her effort to get an injunction to stop the investigation.
In a report dated Aug. 25 and first reported by The Daily News, the
city’s Office of Special Investigations said that it had been unable to
substantiate the charge that Ms. Bloomberg had attempted to recruit
students to join a political organization. The version of the report
given to The Times by the department did not include the name of the
person who originally made the accusation, but it said the complainant
“failed to provide any evidence in support of this allegation.”
However, the report said the investigation had substantiated violations
of several other policies: Specifically, Ms. Bloomberg had failed to
seek the appropriate departmental approval and parental permission for
students to be filmed for a documentary; had hired for two days as a
substitute a retired teacher who was not authorized to work as a
substitute; and had offered at her school a course on Brooklyn history
in lieu of a required government course, again without approval.
An education department spokesman, Michael Aciman, said that in an email
that “appropriate disciplinary action will be taken.”
Ms. Bloomberg, for her part, wrote in an email: “The DOE has admitted
that they initiated an investigation against me based on allegations
from a completely unreliable source. Nonetheless while finding the
allegations of communist organizing to be patently false they are still
threatening disciplinary action based on minor bureaucratic complaints
from the same discredited source. Any disciplinary action is simple
retaliation for our defense of our students, their civil rights and our
advocacy for integration.”
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