May Day Counter-Protest: Our Children Are Not Your Props! (press release)

Parents for Responsive Equitable Safe Schools

6 min readMay 4, 2021

Public school families & educators of Harlem, along with allies, demand school planning be rooted in community concerns and priorities for safety & equity; Denounce Keep Schools Open mayoral candidate rally (happening simultaneously) as cynical exploitation, unrepresentative of the community

On May Day, a day that we are supposed to honor labor activism, it speaks volumes when mayoral candidates stand with those who, for their own private interests, have actively demonized teachers. Local community leaders, parents, students and advocates have come together today for “We Are Not Your Props: A Counter Protest To the Racist Reopen Schools Rally,” an event that will be followed by teach-ins/community conversations. We stand together for framing a plan that meets the needs of the East Harlem community and being one that has been significantly impacted by COVID, recording one of the highest rates of death and lowest rates to vaccine access. Both City Councilwoman Diana Ayala, Assemblyman Robert Rodriguez and District Leader Cordell Cleare stand with their constituents in demanding equity for their community.

~61% of Harlem families have made the choice to keep their children in remote schooling (Distict 4 = 60%, D3 = 64%, D5 = 61%) for the remainder of the school year. Keep NYC Schools Open (KSO) is led by privileged white moms who have repeatedly used the harsh experiences of Black and Brown families as props for their agenda to rush the full reopening of school buildings. This group has spent the past year condemning and blaming New York City teachers for the broken response by Mayor de Blasio, and the former Trump administration. They have also allied with known segregationists who oppose Critical Race Theory and anti-racism; and now they’ve enlisted the support of Mayoral candidates Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia, both of whom support education policies that will maintain our inequitable status quo.

“I stand with the community and will do all that I can to make sure that schools are as safe as they can be for students, especially students who are too young to be vaccinated yet. Our focus is on listening to families, making sure the money coming into the DOE and schools is used to heal and support and create something that is better than what we had before. We are fortunate that there are so many engaged parents, students, and educators asking that the City center equity over what’s politically popular.” — City Councilmember District 8, Diana Ayala

“The children of our community are not props for photo ops. They are not shields to cover a self serving agenda. They are not statistics to cynically wield and weaponize to gain policy changes that will put them at risk. Our coalition of long time allies and advocates for public education stand united to denounce a rush to building reopening that erases the voices of the vast majority of parents in this community that have chosen and stayed in remote learning. Their choice should be honored. Their concerns should be addressed. Their needs should be paramount.” — Aixa Rodriguez, Bronx Educators United for Justice

“New Yorkers for Racially Just Public Schools (RJPS) stands with Harlem families, and families of color across New York City who continue to be ignored and used as props by out-of-touch politicians and white privileged parents who advocate for unsafe and inequitable school reopening. We are proud to join our coalition partners from Harlem to truly engage with our fellow New Yorkers in conversations about safe reopening, how to get involved in the upcoming election, and our policy agenda for racially just public schools. Our children are #NotYourProps.” — New Yorkers for Racially Just Public Schools (RJPS)

“On Twitter, a vocal supporter of the KSO rally refers to the people at this event as the “anti-reopening people.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the folks here are already sending their kids in for in-person instruction; however, most of the families in Harlem remain remote. A decision that they made intentionally and after weighing out all of the factors that have impacted our community. I take issue with the fact that they come into our neighborhood and make demands that don’t align with what the predominantly Black and Latinx community wants and needs. What we demand is that our community’s voices are heard and respected when it comes to what compromises are made for teachers and students in order to get them to come back into school buildings. As a parent leader I would never support decisions that could impact our community’s health and well being.” — Kaliris Salas Ramirez, CEC4 president

We’re concerned with not just getting back into buildings, but in what happens in those buildings once children are there. The NYCDOE is currently proposing that students undergo massive amounts of “assessment” and remediation in the fall. I would contend this is not what children need, especially after a year+ of trauma and disruption, nor how they learn. If you want to rally about children’s mental health, protest a re-opening budget that would enrich the ed tech industry at the expense of the social-emotional needs of our children.” — Kemala Karmen, parent, co-founder of NYC Opt Out

The ‘Nice White Parents’ and Mayoral Candidates who have shown themselves at today’s Keep Schools open rally insist that it is the teachers who are failing their children, that it is our self-interest and irrational fear that is interrupting childrens’ education. But we are here, in solidarity with parent activists and the 60% of the East Harlem community who are keeping their children at home, who insist that it is not teachers but an inequitable, racist, and callous school system that is failing our students. We stand in solidarity with parents to say that together we will build the school system we all deserve, where parents and teachers work together to nurture, humanize, and release the potential of every student, and that means rushing to fund our schools, end the school to prison pipeline, and provide sustaining and healing education. It does NOT mean rushing to force students and families back into buildings they — like us — know are unsafe. — Ilan Desai-Geller, Health Justice Work Group, UFT MORE Caucus

“Until all members of a school community are eligible to be and actually fully vaccinated against COVID, we will continue to advocate for in-person learning safety protocols. We are also thinking about the future. The more transparency we have, restored closure thresholds, robust testing, safe ventilation, prioritization of the most vulnerable students, trust, mechanisms to truly be heard, the better, and more sustainable, our eventual return to in-person school will be.” — Paulette Healy, Parents For Responsive Equitable Safe Schools (PRESS NYC)