NYC scraps plan to close school at center of Hunter College professors racist hot mic scandal

New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels scrapped a plan to close an embattled Upper West Side middle school at the center of a Hunter College professor’s “racist and unacceptable” hot mic comments during a public meeting.Community Action School will remain open so students and their families can continue to “process and recover from” the scandal sparked by Hunter biology professor Allyson Friedman, Samuels wrote in a Monday letter to parents obtained by Chalkbeat.Friedman, an Upper West Side parent of a public school student, inadvertently interrupted a black eighth-grade student’s concerns about the impending closure of CAS during a Feb.10 District 3 Community Education Council board meeting.“They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” she said while her mic was unmuted and as a black student from Community Action School was speaking.

“If you train a black person well enough, they’ll know to use the back,” Friedman said.“You don’t have to tell them anymore.”Before Monday’s reversal, education officials pushed a plan to close CAS because it enrolled only about 170 students, and the kids’ standardized test scores on math and English lagged behind the city average.

But students and parents defended the school as vital.“First, the CAS community is continuing to process and recover from the racist and unacceptable remarks directed toward a CAS student at a [community education council] meeting in February,” Samuels wrote in the letter to parents.“And second, members of the school community shared a strong desire for stability as they move forward.What the CAS community needs right now is meaningful and comprehensive support — and that would be difficult to provide authentically in the context of a phase-out proposal.”Hunter College, which is part of CUNY, placed Friedman on leave last week pending the result of the investigation into the tenured teacher’s remarks, which drew widespread condemnation and cal...