New Trust in Amsterdam : For Many Minorities, ‘The City That Cares’ Once Cared the Least

Amsterdam calls itself “The City That Cares.” It says so on signs scattered around this city perched on a hill above the Mohawk River.

But if you ask the Latinos and blacks who live here, they say the city doesn’t really care. And the New York state Education Department says they are right, that minorities have been discriminated against in city schools.

Long before Los Angeles and other cities exploded in violence after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial, Amsterdam was struggling with its own racial crisis. After nearly a year of demonstrations, recriminations and reconciliation, Amsterdam is trying to rebuild its school system and the trust of its minority residents.

“When it comes to issues of race, when it comes to issues of economic disadvantage and racial diversity, I saw biases that I thought were gone in the 1930s and 1940s that are alive and well,” said Tama Seavey, a black woman.

Amsterdam is not alone, say minority education experts. Virtually every other American city has school systems that have been dominated for generations by white students, teachers and administrators.

By 1995, a third of all public school students in America will be minorities, according to research conducted by the College Board and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

In Amsterdam, the problem is compounded by a long decline that has turned the city from manufacturing giant to economic weakling.

Once, three huge mills wove some 12 million yards of carpet here each year. Knitting mills like the Adirondack, the Warner and the Dean spun out hundreds of thousands of garments. The city had the largest pearl button factory in the world and it produced more brooms than anyplace on Earth.

But the jobs dried up. Many factories were torn down. Some still standing are abandoned shells, skeletons of a dead industrial era.

The garment and carpet industries, which recruited heavily among Latinos, especially from Costa Rica and Puerto Rico in the 1960s and 1970s, moved offshore or folded in the face of foreign competition. Amsterdam’s population, as high as 35,000 in 1925, has fallen to 20,000.

The financial strain has heightened racial tensions.

“Here you’ve lost your job or had to take a lower-paying job and you’ve got to blame somebody,” said John Kling, an Amsterdam resident. “So you look for your nearest target. You’ve got to blame somebody.”

The 1990 census showed 2,405 Latinos lived in Amsterdam--an increase of 71% over 1980. But some Latinos frequently shuttle between the Latin American countries and Caribbean islands where family members remain, making the job of counting them harder. Centro Civico, a Latino community group, estimated that as many as 6,000 Latinos live in the city.

“Eventually, you’re going to see the white middle class get the hell out of here,” Seavey said. “And you’ll have a poverty community. In five years, no one will want to move here. The senior citizens are going to die and there’s not going to be anybody who can fill the void. It will become a large ghetto, right here.”

In Amsterdam nearly 20% of the district’s 3,922 students are black or Latino. The proportion of minority students increases each year.

Amsterdam’s racial controversy started when a newly elected member of the school board, Charles Ferris, made comments in an interview with the Amsterdam newspaper, the Recorder, that Latinos considered offensive.

The Princeton-educated Ferris, a retired rug company executive, said he did not think some cultures are worth emulating.

Things got worse when Ferris said at a subsequent school board meeting that he was canceling a vacation to Nova Scotia because he feared that drug-crazed Latinos, angered by his earlier remarks, might rob and vandalize his house while he was away. He said he had mixed feelings about reporting his fears to police officers because “some of them may be Latinos as well.”

Ferris said he did not mean to insult Latinos and he defended his right to express his opinion. His allies on the school board stood behind Ferris and defeated a resolution calling for his removal.

Ferris’ critics called the school board bloc he is allied with the “Gang of Five.” Each of the five is older than 60 and none has children in district schools. Their elections were carried by voters, many of them retired and living on fixed incomes, who were worried about the rising expenses in the school district.

Ferris’ comments struck a raw nerve. Minority leaders charged that the remarks reflected the systematic and long-ignored racism exercised against Latinos and blacks in city schools and by other city agencies such as the police. Stormy public hearings and demonstrations followed. The letters to the editor and opinion columns of the local newspaper seethed with anger, hate and misunderstanding.

At one protest outside Amsterdam High School, some motorists cursed and made obscene gestures at picketers. Seavey says someone spit in her face as she entered a hall for a City Council meeting. Death threats were directed at leaders of Centro Civico and others active in the school controversy.

Latino teen-agers like Pablo Olivera came forward with allegations that they had been discriminated against in city schools. He said he had been insulted by teachers.

“They said, ‘Go back and take your drugs with you,’ ” the teen-ager said. “ ‘You’re all on welfare anyway.’ ”

Minority community activists asked the state Education Department to investigate the Amsterdam school system.

In February, the department reported that some teachers and administrators had lower expectations for blacks and Latinos than for white students; minorities were more likely to be in remedial courses and to drop out than whites; racial tensions existed in the district’s middle and high schools; the district did a poor job of hiring minorities (of more than 529 district employees, there is one black teacher and two Latino custodians), and the school board was out of touch with the racial problems in the schools.

The state ordered sweeping changes for the schools, including special training for teachers and staff to make them more sensitive to Latinos and improved English-as-second-language instruction for Spanish-speaking students.

“We found problems that are not insurmountable,” said Zelda Holcomb, director of intercultural relations for the state Education Department. “There were problems in terms of expectations for minority students. I hope that we have brought this to a level where people know they need to address the problems.”

And if a school board election in May was any indication, people see that the problems must be addressed.

More than 5,400 people voted, more than in about two decades. The chairwoman of the board and the leader of the Gang of Five, Claire Ludwin, finished seventh out of nine candidates and was ousted. Three moderates were voted in, including the Rev. Eugene Diaz, a leader of the Latino community.

“The community has taken back the schools,” proclaimed Michael Decker, the board member most respected by minorities.