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Ron Felton, NAACP president, Wilkes-Barre Chapter, addresses the Wilkes-Barre Area School Board at Wednesday’s meeting.
PETE G. WILCOX/THE TIMES LEADER
WILKES-BARRE – More than 30 people – the vast majority black – turned Wednesday’s Wilkes-Barre Area School Board meeting into standing room only, with local NAACP leader Ron Felton pressing the district to be “as aggressive as possible” recruiting and retaining minority teachers.
During a spirited back-and-forth, Superintendent Jeff Namey said if there are qualified black applicants “they are an automatic interview.”
Felton has used his role with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to press the issue for years, and held up two large pie charts, one showing about 40 percent of the district students are minorities, but less than 1 percent of teachers are.
“You have been elected to look after the benefit of all children,” Felton said, “you have failed.”
He gave the board three resumes of people he said were qualified to teach, and Namey said their names would be at the top of the list when screening begins for new hires next school year. Namey also repeated an idea he said had been floated months ago: to recruit student teachers from historically black Lincoln University near Philadelphia, increasing the odds the district would get more black applicants at hiring time.
Felton criticized the district for not taking action when a black teacher found a swastika painted on her car and tires flattened, but Namey insisted the district had aggressively investigated the case, found the culprits and won a conviction in court.
When Felton said another black teacher had been threatened by a student with no repercussions, Namey again disagreed, saying the student had been suspended and expulsion proceedings were under way.
After more than an hour of often pointed but polite exchanges with Felton and others in the audience, Namey noted the law does not allow the district to ask an applicant’s race, but if Felton told him of qualified black candidates “I will make sure they are interviewed.”
Asked after the meeting if such a promise violated state law, Assistant Solicitor Ray Wendolowski said he doesn’t believe so because Namey cannot hire anyone. He said he is researching the issue as part of the board’s effort to draw up a written hiring policy, something it does not have.