Park Slope Principal Says She's The Target Of 'Chilling, McCarthyite' Commie Hunt

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — Jill Bloomberg, the longtime principal of Park Slope Collegiate on 7th Avenue, claimed in federal court this week that for the past couple months, she's been the target of a "chilling" and "McCarthyite" commie hunt on the part of the New York City Department of Education.

The city-led campaign has been "swift, harsh and created a devastating chilling effect that affected the entire staff, student body and parents," according to the principal's lawsuit.

Bloomberg claims the Department of Education told her she was under investigation on March 2.

Shortly after, the suit says, a DOE investigator told Assistant Principal Carla Laban that her boss was being investigated because of "communist activities taking place at the school" — then showed her a list of names and asked her to point to the ones she'd seen "engaging in communist activities."

The DOE did not respond to a request for comment from Patch.

Park Slope Collegiate is a small, progressive middle and high school — one of four on the John Jay Educational Campus. Its student body is around three-quarters black or Latino. The surrounding neighborhood, by contrast, is around three-quarters white.

In her lawsuit against the DOE and NYC Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina, Bloomberg says that in 13 years as the school's principal, she's never been afraid to speak out about the severe segregation in the NYC school system and the difference she's seen in city resources allotted to white kids vs. black and brown kids.

For example, in 2010, she says she was on the front line of protests against Millennium Brooklyn, a new high school with mostly white students, opening on the John Jay campus. She likened it to "the creation of a racial enclave." (In the end, Millennium Brooklyn opened anyway.)

But the principal says her activism took on new life last year, when a girls' volleyball team shared by the three minority-heavy schools at John Jay was "singled out, humiliated and treated like criminals by the school safety agents at another, predominantly white school."

At that point, Bloomberg says she started hounding DOE officials about what she saw as "two separate and unequal sports programs" at John Jay — one shared by the three schools with mostly black and Latino students, and a much more robust one for the mostly white kids at Millennium Brooklyn and its sister school across the river, Millennium Manhattan.

The principal felt these "segregated sports teams" were a blatant violation of the Civil Rights Act — and said so, in a defiant letter to the DOE. Copies of this letter were passed out on the John Jay campus by the Park Slope Collegiate PTA in February.

A few weeks later, Bloomberg's lawsuit says, the commie hunt began.

“I think I just said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This is something [the DOE] investigates?’” Bloomberg said in an interview with the New York Times. “I mean, what decade are we living in?”

Dozens of teachers, parents and students from Park Slope Collegiate packed into a Manhattan courtroom Monday to stand by their principal, according to the New York Times. A petition of support is posted to the school website.

However, there may also be a smaller, quieter campus contingent that fears Bloomberg could, in fact, be turning the kids into commies. "A small number of staff members," the Times reported, "who would speak only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution... point to posts on the Progressive Labor Party website that claim students have joined a study group sponsored by the party."

Lead photo courtesy of Park Slope Collegiate