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NYC School’s Faculty Says Principal Is Racist Against White Staff

A Washington Heights high school principal is facing a probe by the New York City Department of Education for allegedly discriminating against white teachers.

The probe was launched after faculty members at High School for Law and Public Service accused principal Paula Lev of discriminating against staff and conspiring to get a white colleague fired.

Faculty filed a complaint with the Education Department and also voted they had ‘no confidence’ in Lev’s leadership.

The complaint, which was obtained by the New York Post, claims that Lev ‘flagrantly but unsuccessfully attempted to divide our school by race’ and told an employee that she ‘was going to get rid of all these white teachers that aren’t doing anything for the kids of our community.’

‘She definitely has something against white people,’ it adds.

A faculty member writes in the OEO complaint that Lev, 39, who is Dominican, approached him with a plan to terminate an unidentified white, female employee. Lev asked him to get a state education certification so he would have more qualifications than the white employee and Lev could fire her as ‘excess’ staff.

‘Ms. Lev has asked me to conspire with her on a couple of occasions in getting rid of my colleague,’ the faculty member wrote in the complaint.

‘She also stated to me in Spanish that she was ‘going to get rid of all these white teachers that aren’t doing anything for the kids of our community. I believe Ms. Lev is not suited for the position of principal because of the comments she has made to me about white people and the malicious ways in which she thinks and speaks. She is not fit to be a leader of a school.

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It is unclear if Lev knew about the complaint, but on the last day of school she laid off the faculty member who filed it and said he was no longer needed at the school and should look for work elsewhere in the DOE.

‘He blew the whistle on her and a week later he was (let go),’ an unnamed source told the New York Post.

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Tensions first flared between Lev and staff in February, when she publicly accused Nick Bacon, the union chapter leader, of being racist after he filed a routine grievance about a scheduling issue affecting faculty members.

Lev confronted Bacon in front of a room of his colleagues and said, ‘I wasn’t sure what your problem with me was, maybe it’s because I am a woman of color and you’re a white man?’

Bacon wrote about the incident on March 2 in a letter signed other staff members and sent to Manny Ramirez, the superintendent of District 6. The grievance was solved in Bacon’s favor and Ramirez acknowledged in a staff meeting that Lev’s comment was ‘inappropriate,’ but that the two must work together and move past it.

{snip} However, she stood by her comment and said it represented how she felt. She also recommended that Bacon read Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book ‘White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.’

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