For Tanika Jones-Cole, watching her own child’s school suffer prompted her to take action.
“There’s a time in every parent’s life when they realize they need to stand up and do something,” as Jones-Cole put it. In her case, that “something” was to organize the Syracuse branch of the Alliance for Quality Education.
The Alliance is a statewide non-profit coalition of 230 groups bringing together parents, teachers and education officials. It has seven branches in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, New York City and Long Island. Among its members are the New York State United Teachers, Parents for Public Schools and the New York State Council of Superintendents.
The Alliance’s goal, captured in its name: quality education for all New York students. It lobbies against cutting jobs of teachers and teachers’ aids and for more money for state schools.
For example, the Alliance was a key advocate for a 2006 court settlement that found the government had chronically under funded New York City’s public schools. The settlement won nearly $7 billion in additional aid for schools.
“The settlement was a huge victory for education, and gave the potential for many schools to make a needed turn-around,” said Bill Spreter, an Alliance member and a retired teacher from the Hannibal Central School District.
In 2009, the Alliance lobbied the government when Gov. David Paterson proposed a $686 million mid-year state cut for school budgets. This cut would have resulted in the immediate termination of hundreds of teachers across the state. In protest rallies across the state, Alliance members symbolically snapped pencils in half at rallies to depict the broken promises of government funding. They even delivered a five-foot pencil to Paterson’s office, on which was written “NO MORE BROKEN PROMISES” in bold capital letters.
“Thankfully, the cuts were overturned,” said Gerry Lotierzo, an Alliance member and a retired teacher from the Liverpool Central School District.
Right now, the Alliance is organizing events across the state to protest Paterson’s recent budget proposal to cut $1.1 billion in school spending. At a rally in Syracuse’s Edward Smith Middle School on March 4, shouts and chants echoed and boomed throughout the auditorium. The rally drew more than 100 people for the protest.
“They say cut back, we say fight back!” chanted the protestors.
Among the speakers was 7-year-old Ajahnik Brown-Cole, daughter of Syracuse Alliance founder Tanika Jones-Cole. Said Ajahnik: “I need my education. I want to go to college, get my degree and get a job.”
In 2006, her mother, Tanika Jones-Cole, recalls, she was so dismayed by the quality of education that she removed her oldest daughter, Jadasiah Cole, a fifth-grader at the time, from Frazer School and switcher her to Edward Smith Elementary School.
“There simply weren’t enough resources at her old school,” said Jones-Cole, “My children have been promised a sound basic education by the state, and I’m going to make sure they get it.”
(Pete Smith is a junior with dual majors in newspaper journalism and Middle Eastern studies.)
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