Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama,

Greetings from the South and Southeast neighborhoods of the Bronx! Congratulations on yet another bestseller. Many of us are diligently reading and enjoying A Promised Land and the Former First Lady’s Becoming.

The District 8 Community Education Council salutes you on the eve of our return to smart, sensible, and stalwart governance in our great nation. We are writing to you in the name of education on behalf of underserved communities in the Bronx.

As someone who champions the Civil Rights issues of the 21st century and who is dedicated to the formation of future leaders, we are confident that you understand equity in education as the premiere Civil Rights issue of our time. It is for this reason that we are requesting your direct support and intervention to return us to the noble path of cutting-edge community schooling.

In 2009 and throughout your presidency, many students and teachers in the South Bronx reached out to you to talk about equity in education, specifically vocational and technical education, not only as a Civil Rights issue – but also as an economic issue.

Back then, we talked about creating opportunities for students to learn skills that would allow them to earn money upon high school graduation as they put themselves through college if they should choose to go to college – because not attending college should not impede upward mobility.

We further talked about apprenticeships and a student’s ability to earn money as they attend high school, because we know that many poor students abandon their high school studies or do not attend high school regularly enough to truly learn and graduate due to the economic pressure to help out their families, once they are old enough to obtain working papers.

We further talked about beginning coaching families for these opportunities from the conception of their children and not letting up until the children have attained a career, hence preparing those spaces to learn these vocational and technical skills the minute a child is beginning to learn their shapes, colors, letters, and numbers.

We also invited you to a Bronx Education Summit to begin framing this new vision of education in underserved communities that would have addressed at once the issues of equity in education, Civil/Human Rights, the eradication of poverty, the promotion of upward mobility for communities that have been systematically left behind for far too long, and the idea of targeted education initiatives to respond to the needs of different communities and demographics – because it is not true that we can have just one system of education if we are serious about creating a more just and equal society.

We have now extended that same invitation to President-Elect Biden. We hope he will accept our invitation and we hope you will join him.

We understand how difficult your terms as president were and how this work could not be completed during your presidency. However, we continue to believe that you still remain the best person to help us speak on these issues – more than ever, precisely because you can now speak more freely and choose the causes that are closest to your heart to work on.

As you are all too aware, over the past several years the pursuit of equity and access for the public-school children of the South Bronx – as well as similar historically disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout the country – was abandoned in favor of privileging the few while divesting from the public sector in general. Your work in this area, as in many others, was carelessly decimated and underserved communities were pushed further down the abyss of inequities.

With the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, our hope for equity in education has been renewed, and our optimism for the possibility of making our union more perfect has been resurrected. With your support and intervention, we are now ready to get back to the work of true community-based, cutting-edge public schooling.

That being said, as you can imagine, we are tired of the verbiage of equity unaccompanied by a concrete vision of college-and-career readiness. Instead, we favor an articulated plan that places authentic STEM + Arts programming at the cornerstone of 21st-century community schooling. Simply raising awareness is not enough.

Our community needs real investment in applied and integrated learning that situates traditional academic classes into real-world laboratories, maker-spaces and design studios. There are infinite opportunities in the metro NYC area for our children to gain access to high-level college-and-career opportunities, but not if the vision for K-12 holds on to the tried-but-untrue legacy of NCLB teach-to-the-test paper-and-pencil rote learning.

Instead, the members of the Community Education Council of District 8 want to express our fullest endorsement of the STEAM Community School Model. In this model, the social capital of our South Bronx community and culture is fused with applied learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to situate our children’s learning in the context of hands-on, culturally empowering curricula.

In this model, we invest in our local community campuses and create opportunities in-house, as opposed to privatized aspirations that lead to the mass exodus of talent and intellect from our neighborhood.

We know that your administration once espoused this vision as well. And many of our storied District 8 school campuses including Albert Einstein on Bolton Avenue have pushed ahead in the darkness with the original template your administration created.

Our district did not abandon the community school hope in the darkest hour, but moved forward with STEAM at the core of our district mission and vision. Moreover, we have not abandoned the vision of community schools put forward by your administration, the Office of Former First Lady Michelle Obama, and your Department of Justice, headed by Former Attorney General Eric Holder.

Whether we are talking about STEAM, community policing or healthy living (the Former First Lady’s Let’s Move Initiative, Community Gardening Initiative, Healthy Lunches Initiative), our Community Superintendent Dr. Erika Tobia has embraced it all and has tweaked those initiatives into District 8 Community Project Partnerships. In this package, we have included an overview of our Operation F.I.S.H. (Food, Innovation, Sustainability, Health) and our Community Policing Project.

Our hope is that the Obama Foundation and MBK will directly partner with us on these initiatives, as we need all the support and guidance we can amass. More than that, we would like to hold direct conversations with you that you can transmit to the Biden-Harris Transition Team, Future First Lady Jill Biden, and the future Biden-Harris Administration.

We believe that you know us well enough to be cognizant of the fact that we are solution oriented and are always able to diagnose our problems and suggest solutions. As usual, we just need a little support and guidance. And we hope to obtain it from you.

Included in this package is the letter we sent to President-Elect Biden, Vice-President-Elect Harris, and soon-to-be First Lady Biden.

We once again humbly ask that you help facilitate our direct link to the incoming President Biden, incoming Vice-President Harris and incoming First lady Jill Biden – so that we can get to the work of developing the very spaces – media centers, labs, stages, studios, gardens, and athletic fields – that will allow for the fullest realization of true-blue neighborhood Community Schools.

Thank you so much, President Obama, for your time and consideration. We hope to hear from you very soon and are eagerly looking forward to that. Our warmest and best wishes to you, your family and all your loved ones during the holidays season. Please stay safe and healthy.

In Solidarity and Purpose

Warmest regards

Farah Despeignes, President,
Eduardo H. Hernandez, PhD, Vice President, BPA Darlene Martinez, 2nd Vice President
Aurora Ronda, Recording Secretary
Sean Turner, Treasurer
Michael Beltzer
Gerald J. Cannon, IEP
Latoya Coleman
Lourdes Jibodh, BPA
Fabian Wander