Jewish Critics Meet Board Members Board Which Named Fuentes Plans First Meeting on Issue

For the first time since the controversy broke over the much-criticized appointment of Luis Fuentes as superintendent of Community School District One on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, members of the local school board which named him — including the school board chairman — met with representatives of Jewish organizations protesting the appointment and the board will meet this week to consider the issue, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned today.

The meeting was held last Thursday in the office of Mrs. Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairman of the City Commission of Human Rights, at her initiative and on that of Mrs. Georginia Hoggard, the district school board chairman. Present at that meeting were Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Hoggard, another local school board member and representatives of the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee, which joined in demanding Fuentes’ ouster on charges of repeated remarks slurring Jews and other minorities when he was a principal in an Ocean Hill-Brownsville school.

Haskell Lazere, director of the New York chapter of the AJ Committee, one of those present, described the meeting as “progressive, polite and a clearing of the air.” Mrs. Hoggard reportedly told the meeting that the community school board was prepared to hear the charges against Fuentes and act accordingly. Mrs. Hoggard told Mrs. Norton that the community school board first heard of the racism charges against Fuentes through newspaper accounts.

An AJ Congress spokesman said the list of grievances against Fuentes was being prepared and would be presented to the school board, probably some time next week. At that time, it was understood, the board will have before it the question on voting on whether or not to retain Fuentes. If the school board decides to retain Fuentes in the $37,000-a-year post, the Jewish organizations plan to lodge an appeal with N.Y. City School Chancellor Harvey Scribner, who is empowered under the state-approved decentralization law to remove any locally-named district school superintendent but who has voiced a strong preference that the issue be settled at the local level by the local school district.

The report that District One school board members had met with protesting Jewish organizations apparently had not been known to the Council of Jewish Organizations in Civil Service, a 130,000-amalgamation of 34 public employee groups, when it drafted a statement, released today, joining the protest against the appointment of Fuentes and demanding his ouster. The Council, which includes among its constituents the 30,000 members of the Jewish Teachers Association and members of the Police Department’s Shomrim Society, said it had notified city and state officials of its demand for Fuentes’ ouster because of a “well-documented record of anti-Semitic statements.”

Louis Weiser, a retired New York City police detective lieutenant and former Deputy Commissioner of Investigation, the Council president, said that it was “totally inconceivable to us that a man of Fuentes’ reputation for anti-Semitism could be retained in the New York City school system, and his elevation to the level of district superintendent is beyond the ken of reasonable men.” Weiser said the Council had investigated the charges against Fuentes and added that it had found that the charges were authenticated by sworn affidavits and Fuentes’ own public remarks before a meeting of the Board of Education. A spokesman for the Council said that, in seeking Fuentes’ ouster, the Council would work with the four major Jewish organizations which had originally demanded Fuentes’ removal. “We will give them legal aid and any other help they need in their present efforts.”

In a guest editorial today in the Spanish-language daily El Diaro, Fuentes hit back at his critics, charging that “certain interest groups.” mentioning the Board of Education, union officials and politicians, “would prefer to discuss manufactured, five-year-old conversations” relative to his new appointment — presumably a reference to his alleged racist remarks as an Ocean Hill-Brownsville principal in Brooklyn — rather than the low level of literacy in the Lower East Side schools. He wrote that “beneath the public charges these groups have been making is their opposition to my record of personal commitment to the cause of parental involvement and teacher accountability. Their smoke screen of rhetoric can only add obstacles to what already is the most formidable challenge of my life.”