The city Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez’s wife, a high-ranking official with the city Department of Education, and their two daughters filed a lawsuit against the ritzy Ethical Culture Fieldston School in another instance of alleged racial discrimination at the scandal-scarred school.
The explosive lawsuit, filed in federal court by Cristina Melendez, a director with the Department of Education’s Family and Community Engagement (FACE) program alleges that her two daughters — of Dominican descent and only identified in court documents as YA and YS — were exposed to racial inequality while the private school in the Riverdale section of the Northwest Bronx “purposely, knowingly and intentionally refused to conduct proper investigations following these incidents.”
The Fieldston school, including heads Jessica Bagby and Joe Algrant, high school assistant principal Kenny Graves and ninth-grade teacher Stephanie Weber are all named as defendants in the lawsuit, which was filed in June.
Rodriguez, a former council member who represented District 10 in Manhattan, was named as the city’s DOT commissioner in December 2021. Rodriguez takes home more than $243,000 per year, while Melendez makes an annual salary of $195,000, according to NYC Open Data.
In September 2017, YA, the older daughter, was beginning fifth grade at Fieldston, while YS, the younger daughter, was starting pre-K, according to court filings. Under Bagby, both daughters — along with others students and families of color — were denied the same opportunities and benefits which had been provided to white students, the lawsuit claims, thus abandoning the school’s mission to provide an equal and inclusive educational environment for students of color.
As a result, the Fieldston school became a forum for “severe and pervasive racial animus,” which took a toll on the two daughters’ self-esteem and academic confidence, along with their physical and mental health, according to the lawsuit.
Melendez and her two daughters, along with other parents and students of color, witnessed numerous incidents in 2017 involving racism, including white students using the n-word when addressing or referring to Black or brown students — behavior that was allegedly ignored and/or excused by Fieldston adminstrators.
During the 2018 spring semester, Melendez, the two daughters — aged 10 and 16 — and the entire school community were exposed to a widely circulated video of two senior students, who were white, singing a song in which they repeatedly used the n-word.
The lawsuit claims that the school refused to take disciplinary action against the two students and permitted them to graduate from Fieldston later that semester.
At around the same time, a Fieldston student of color and his parents — after unsuccessfully lobbying for an $8 million payout from the school — brought a lawsuit against Fieldston and Bagby, charging them with racial discrimination and retaliation after Bagby allegedly falsely reported the student’s parents to NYC’s Child Protective Services for parental neglect. Once knowledge of the lawsuit became widespread, the school’s head publicly attacked the student and his parents in an email to the entire Fieldston community, accusing the plaintiffs in that case for filing a “baseless lawsuit” and “profiteering” at the expense of student safety.
Bagby would eventually resign from Ethical Culture Fieldston School in 2021.
Fieldston’s Bronx campus includes three schools for kids pre-K through 12th grade. Founded in the late 19th century by Felix Alder, Fieldston started out as a free school which served poor children throughout the city.
“These allegations primarily date back to 2016 and have been thoroughly addressed by the school in the years since then. We treat any allegations of this kind extremely seriously and ECFS prioritizes our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by striving to create a welcoming environment where all students can excel,” a spokesperson for the school told the Bronx Times. “We recently expanded our Community and Social Impact department and further embedded it into the fabric of the school – these team members consult on curriculum; plan school-wide DEI-related programming; train facilitators to lead anti-bias identity development work; participate in the hiring process; organize youth leadership conferences; and support our students as they define their identity in our community and beyond.”
But the most recent lawsuit brought by Rodriguez’s family contends acts of racism have been an ongoing theme at the school, as well as consequences for those who made the decision to speak up about such instances.
“The plaintiffs in this action are not the only persons of color who were confronted with racism and retaliation at ECFS,” the lawsuit reads. “Despite its facade of inclusion, the school has a record of systemic indifference to racial bullying and a record, practice and policy of retaliating against those who complain about it.”
In 2016, a group of white students brought several dozen large watermelons into the school and littered the entire office of a Black mid-level administrator as a “senior prank.” The incident was not investigated, however.
In discussions with other Fieldston students of color, Rodriguez and Melendez’s daughters learned that white students at the school had previously taunted a female Black student about her hair, without consequence. They also learned that, in another incident, a white middle school student berated a Black student with the n-word while whipping them with a sweater.
Several of those instances were the basis for another lawsuit filed against the school by former students earlier this year. And Fieldston has faced a handful of discrimination lawsuits in recent years.
In October 2021, a student in the older daughter’s ninth-grade class used the n-word as a racial slur, the lawsuit reads. Three months later, the older daughter reported to a Fieldston School doctor that high school science teacher Palma Repole was treating her unfairly and harshly on account of her race, while Melendez also complained to Graves, the high school assistant principal, about the issue.
In early April 2022, Melendez sent an email to school administrators after her older daughter was also being treated unfairly by high school math teacher Stephanie Weber. According to the lawsuit, Weber “frequently ridiculed” the girl in front of the class, but never did the same publicly to white students. The day after receiving the email and in a “clear act of retaliatory retribution,” Weber responded with a false accusation that the older daughter had cheated on an in-class assignment.
More than 50 Fieldston high school students, which included students of color and supportive white students, joined in a mass protest to demonstrate against and expose the school’s “utter indifference to racism on the campus” in March 2019, according to the lawsuit. But it wasn’t the first time the issue of racism had been tackled head-on at the well-to-do institution.
In response to Fieldston’s perceived racially toxic environment, some school officials attempted to address the matter in the mid-2010s when George Burns, the former longtime principal of the lower school, started a “Conversion About Race” program. Fourth and fifth graders participated in group talks, as part of the program, for the purpose of discussing and learning about race, racism and its effect on all people and cultures.
Burns, who made it clear to students, parents, educators and other staff at the school that offensive racial comments would not be tolerated, on one occasion required a fifth grader to read an apology letter in front of the entire class, after calling a student of color the n-word.
Burn’s program gained national acclaim, but not without objection from white parents and educators, who, according to the lawsuit, expressed resentment, saying that “people of color complain too much,” that such concerns were “overblown” and that “white lives matter too.”
The Bronx Times reached out to the plaintiffs’ attorney Nathaniel Smith for comment and is awaiting a response.
This article was updated on Nov. 7 at 10:35 a.m. to include a comment on behalf of Ethical Culture Fieldston School.
Reach Steven Goodstein at sgoodstein@schnepsmedia.com or (718) 260-4561. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
