Fighting for the right to play sports

BY MAY 2014, after three years of steadfast organizing, New York City's Small Schools Athletic League boasted 90 teams from 42 small city high schools, with more than 1,700 student athletes--more than many U.S. towns. The growth of the league and the reputation of its founder, David Garcia-Rosen, seemed assured.

However, less than a year later, on March 25 of this year, Garcia-Rosen, a dean at International Community High School (ICHS), was sent to a New York City Department of Education (DOE) detention center for leading his students on direct actions to address inequities in sports funding in the city.

Teachers facing an inquiry by the DOE's Office of Special Investigations spend their work hours at these detention centers until the disciplinary process has run its course, which can taken months or even years. The targeting of Garcia-Rosen and two other teachers at ICHS shows both the lengths the system will go to retaliate against a determined fighter, and the organization necessary to mobilize against it.

GARCIA-ROSEN was hired in 2010 as dean at ICHS, an international school for recently emigrated English-language learners, with a mandate from the administration to implement restorative justice protocols to address a spate of violent altercations between students.

However, while resolving their disputes, Garcia-Rosen and his students became increasingly aware that their root cause was the lack of opportunities available to them, particularly in sports--especially compared to large schools with predominately white populations. By way of comparison, Tottenville High School in Staten Island, which is 82 percent white, has more than 40 sports teams.

In response to this growing awareness, Garcia-Rosen, a sports lover himself, approached the Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) in March 2011 for a soccer team. When advised to give up on soccer and apply for less popular sports like cricket, Garcia-Rosen accommodated and applied for a cricket team, in addition to a baseball team. Both applications were denied, even after the PSAL Cricket Commissioner assured Garcia-Rosen that his school would have a team the following school year.

In May 2011, in the face of these obstacles, ICHS and Bronx International High Schools held an indoor soccer tournament, which was so enthusiastically received by players and spectators that Garcia-Rosen, with the backing of both principals, decided to build the Small Schools Athletic League (SSAL)--a league that would be independent of PSAL and oriented on small schools.

Garcia-Rosen showed his considerable organizational talents: A few weeks later in June 2011, eight high school principals agreed to contribute for the refs and coaches for their schools, which Garcia-Rosen offered to provide at no charge.

During the 2011-2012 academic year, the fledgling SSAL received enough permits from the Bronx and Randall's Island Parks Department to hold an eight-game season with playoffs and proceeded to grow through a series of triumphs: 1) a first game and fall season in October 2011; 2) a first championship before 100 fans and college scouts in November 2011; 3) a first spring season in March 2012 with boys' baseball, girls' volleyball and co-ed soccer; and 4) championship playoffs in all three sports in June 2012.

At the same time, Garcia-Rosen undertook a private research project into the PSAL's distribution of sports funding by way of addressing wider questions of disparate impact, as outlined in Title VI.

WHEN MORE principals joined in with funding, the 2012-2013 academic year seemed poised to continue SSAL's growth and implantation in the community. However, while enjoying his successes, Garcia-Rosen continued to call attention to the lack of equity in the distribution of sports funding that had led him to found SSAL in the first place, and he started a website to support his project.

In February 2013, at a meeting with his principal and the leadership of the SSAL and PSAL, he presented on the preliminary findings of the SSAL--namely that the PSAL's inequitable distribution of sports funding was having a disproportionately negative impact in districts and high schools with the highest percentages of poverty and students of color.

"At the meeting, Eric Goldstein [the CEO of School Support Service] called me 'Mr. Fire and Brimstone,'" Garcia-Rosen said. "And he said, 'There will be no Marxist redistribution of teams...we've been doing it this way for years, and that's not going to change.'" Goldstein's refusal was echoed by Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm, who in June 2013 said that she had no money for the SSAL.

In July 2013, at the suggestion of Senior Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, Garcia-Rosen submitted a range of estimates for funding the SSAL. These appeared to bear fruit: In August 2013, a fellow principal was informed that the DOE would allocate $225,000 (the lowest estimate) to the SSAL. Since the money for sports had hitherto come out of principal's budgets, it was a major victory to have the money come from the DOE.

Because SSAL was organized separately from the NYC DOE, however, bureaucratic hurdles prevented Garcia-Rosen from accessing the promised funds. As a result, in the fall of 2013, Garcia-Rosen, now working full-time for SSAL, spent the academic year meeting with nearly 50 supporters--including more than 20 principals, the NYC DOE's office of public giving, the A+ youth program, the leadership of the United Federation of Teachers, community boards, the office of Polakow-Suransky, City Council members Daniel Dromm, Maria del Carmen Arroyo, Melissa Mark-Viverito and Annabel Palma, state senators and representatives from the New Visions school partnership--to gain access to the money they had been promised.

While throwing up financial hurdles, the DOE also tried to lure Garcia-Rosen away from his activism by offering him a position with the PSAL--at two meetings in March and May 2014. However, when Garcia-Rosen raised questions at the hiring interview about what mandate the position would have to effect change in sports funding equity, DOE officials dismissed his questions as divisive. In response, Garcia-Rosen began to organize a direct action at the upcoming city budget hearing, which numerous schools planned to attend.

In anticipation of the protest, the DOE warned all schools against sending student-athletes to the May 28 budget hearing. Two schools--Garcia-Rosen's ICHS and the Community School for Social Justice--defied the order, and about 100 students protested the hearing by wearing their jerseys in reverse.

When Chancellor Carmen Fariña refused to accept the students' letters and petitions, Garcia-Rosen gave an impromptu speech in the chambers followed up by an appearance on a WNYC political talk show two days later--just as the DOE began a retaliatory audit of Garcia-Rosen's "p-card," or purchasing card.

Initially, Garcia-Rosen's determination appeared to pay off. On June 23, 2014, SSAL was exhilarated to learn that it had been given $825,000 in the final city budget agreement. It finally appeared as though the unfair burden of funding their own sports teams would be lifted from small schools.

However, when Garcia-Rosen tried to organize a meeting with the director of PSAL and A+, which had agreed to match the money, PSAL cancelled without explanation. Without funding, SSAL was forced to cancel its 2014 season, and Garcia-Rosen went back to being dean at ICHS. Unwilling to work in such a contentious atmosphere, A+ left, taking its matching funds with it.

IN LATE September 2014, it became clear where the $825,000 had gone when PSAL announced on its website that it was creating a small school athletic league.

According to Garcia-Rosen, by November 2014, PSAL had canceled both the co-ed soccer and baseball season and had only 27 teams out of the 176 teams that were originally requested. When ICHS students agitated for a protest in response, Garcia-Rosen advised them to be patient and formed a civil rights club to study Martin Luther King's philosophy of nonviolence.

Garcia-Rosen went on to file a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, after withdrawing a first complaint filed in May 2014. With DOE approval, he took his students twice to Albany to protest Gov. Andrew Cuomo's attacks on education.

Garcia-Rosen and his supporters were not the only ones with civil-rights concerns regarding the PSAL. In February 2015, in response to a 2010 complaint filed by the National Women's Law Center, the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights announced that it found New York City, the nation's largest school system, in violation of Title IX for its failure to provide equal sports opportunities.

In growing frustration with their dwindling sports opportunities, Garcia-Rosen's students began planning another direct action at a city budget hearing scheduled for March 25. The day before, the DOE sent out robo-calls to the homes of student athletes warning parents that attendance at the budget hearing would be considered an unexplained absence.

Understandably, the overwhelmingly immigrant parents, many with little to no knowledge of English, were frightened and warned their children to desist from action. Despite this fear-mongering, a core of students and Garcia-Rosen still went to the budget hearing, where Chancellor Fariña publicly offered to meet with the students. She later cancelled the meeting.

WHEN GARCIA-Rosen came to school the following day, he and the college counselor, Maria Damato, received letters assigning them to detention centers pending an inquiry by the Office of Special Investigations. This information was shared with one of the student leaders, who disseminated the message, prompting a school-wide walkout that the administration tried to stop by locking the doors. Still, 100 students managed to escape and went to Tweed to protest.

The following morning, students protested in front of the school building by refusing to enter. A media teacher who had organized a class project around filming the protests was fired. Garcia-Rosen and Damato continue the fight for sports funding equity from the detention centers, where they spend their days separated from the students they care for so deeply.

Eighteen months ago, it seemed that struggles like Garcia-Rosen's would find an advocate in the city government. After Democrat Bill de Blasio campaigned to end New York's "tale of two cities," his landslide election in November 2013 and subsequent appointment of Carmen Fariña as schools chancellor gave many working-class New Yorkers reason to believe that the gross excesses of the Bloomberg era had ended.

Unfortunately, Garcia-Rosen's ongoing struggle for sports funding equity shows that, despite a new veneer of liberal rhetoric, little has changed in city politics. In fact, less than two miles from ICHS, where students beg for soccer balls, lies Yankee Stadium, recently renovated at a cost of $1.5 billion and ticket prices costing hundreds of dollars.

As Garcia-Rosen explains:

The model [of SSAL] is totally different [from PSAL]...We view it as an educational program, whereas the PSAL, which was founded in 1903, is modeled on the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). For instance, PSAL doesn't let students play sports after they turn 19. But in the international schools, we have many students who start their freshman year at 15 or 16, reading at a second-grade level in their native languages. It takes them five years to graduate, sometimes six, through no fault of their own.

In that fifth or sixth year, when they're most at risk of dropping out, when they're 19, 20, they cannot play PSAL sports. In our league, when you're eligible to step into a high school, you're eligible to play sports. Sports should not exist in a bubble, where when you're 20, you can do math, yoga, dance, chess, English, you can do everything, but the one thing we know is going to keep you in the building, you can't do...

Again, that is the paradigm-shifting model we're putting forward. The PSAL does not share our vision. We really don't see this existing under the PSAL.