Communities in Support of the Khalil Gibran International Academy responds to the news that the current principal of the Arabic-language public school, Holly Anne Reichert, is stepping down to make way for a principal at another public school to take over the job: Beshir Abdelatiff.
What is the Department of Education (DOE) up to? Its recent behavior in the case of Debbie Almontaser “is suspicious, to say the least,” stated her lawyers, Alan Levine and Cynthia Rollings. According to Levine, “Only days earlier, the DOE was charged by a federal agency [the EEOC] with having discriminated against an Arab-American principal, and then they install an Arab-American as the school’s principal. The timing seems a bit more than coincidental.”..
[F]airness demands that Debbie Almontaser be placed back into the position she held of interim acting principal until the C-30 application
process can take place. She was, after all, the person that the DOE and community agreed was most qualified to lead the school in the first place.
According to Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York, “If the DOE was operating in good faith and not trying to deflect the impact of the EEOC determination, they would certainly not have removed a principal and installed a new one with one day’s notice. The DOE must not be allowed to ignore the very serious findings of discrimination of the EEOC Determination.”
