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A Newark Board of Education member whose family has spoken out about racial harassment and tensions at a controversial district high school may be facing removal from her seat, Chalkbeat has learned.
In November, the school board voted to ask the state education department to recommend the removal of six-year board member Dawn Haynes, according to a source who has seen the petition. The petition, which was discussed in a closed-door session not open to the public last month, has not been made public by the district.
Four board members voted to send the petition to the state, three abstained, and one voted against it.
Paul Brubaker, Newark Public Schools’ communications director, did not respond to emailed questions about why the district is asking the state to recommend Haynes’ removal and why the petition is not public.
The board’s petition, signed by Superintendent Roger León, comes after Haynes’ daughter, Akela Haynes, filed a legal claim in October against the district alleging religious, racial, and gender discrimination and other harassment during her time as a Newark School of Global Studies student. The claim also alleges León and principal Nelson Ruiz are liable for violating their obligation to protect Akela Haynes from “the physical and psychological harms” she experienced at the school.
In a call with Chalkbeat on Monday, Akela Haynes, who waited until she was 18 to file her claim, said she wants transparency on the harassment she says she and her peers experienced at Global Studies and wants to “make it very clear that what happened should never happen again.”
After filing notice of a claim, under state law, an individual must wait six months to file a lawsuit to give a public entity a chance to respond. Akela Haynes sent her claim to Newark Public Schools on Oct. 25.
Brubaker did not respond to an email asking the district for a response to Akela Haynes’ claim or what it has done to address the problems at Global Studies.
Additionally, board member Haynes — who’s currently serving her third term — also faced an ethics complaint in March 2023 alleging she used her position as board president to pressure Global Studies parent liaison Samantha Heer to organize a meeting between parents and the school’s student council, according to the complaint obtained by Chalkbeat via a public records request. Heer filed the complaint, but a decision on it has not been posted online by the state’s School Ethics Commission.
Haynes’ possible removal from the board is the latest fallout from the ongoing controversy about Global Studies. Since 2022, students and teachers have come forward to describe a pattern of racist harassment at Global Studies and emails obtained by Chalkbeat in 2023 showed they endured months of harassment and abuse before they pleaded to the school board for help.
Incidents at the school led the Newark Board of Education to commission an outside consultant to study the cultural, racial, and religious dynamics on campus and create recommendations – but the board has refused to release the report despite a lawsuit from the teachers union.
Former Global Studies students allege racist harassment
In November 2022, Akela Haynes joined a group of Black students who spoke at a board meeting about the racial harassment they say they experienced at Global Studies. But the tensions at the school persisted without help from the school’s administration, she said, forcing Akela Haynes to transfer out in the middle of her junior year despite being an honor roll student and student body secretary.
In her claim, Akela Haynes alleges that between September 2020 and December 2022, she “suffered pervasive and consistent” discrimination, sexual harassment, assault, battery, intimidation, bullying, cyber-bullying, emotional distress, and other inappropriate and unlawful treatment.
During her time as a Global Studies student, Akela Haynes recalled getting into a verbal altercation with a male peer because “he basically walked past me and called me the N-word,” she told Chalkbeat. She also had another encounter with the same student where he called her a terrorist, said Akela Haynes, who is Muslim, as her voice became shaky and cracked with emotion.
But “the final straw” that prompted her transfer was when a student destroyed her headphones, she said. She says she raised the issue with the school’s leadership but “not only did they try to cover it up, they also treated me as if I was the person who destroyed property,” Akela Haynes said.
Some of her peers also transferred out of the high school, including David Allen, former president of the Black Student Union at Global Studies. Allen was a Chalkbeat Student Voices fellow last year and wrote about the situation at the high school that had “escalated from kids teasing each other” to Black students “being the targets of racist harassment and hostility.”
During a press conference last year, León said the district was working on taking “corrective action” at the school but it has not shared specific details about its plan. León added that he wanted to “tap the students at Global Studies” to work with him and help inform the district’s strategy on race.
In March 2023, four months after Akela Haynes went public with allegations of racial harassment at Global Studies, Dawn Haynes received an ethics complaint for “demanding a meeting without following school protocols” at Global Studies in December 2022, according to the complaint filed by Heer, the parent liaison at the high school. The complaint further alleges that Dawn Haynes used her position as board president at the time to pressure Heer to set up the meeting.
“Ms. Haynes did not recognize that authority rests with the Newark Board of Education and took private action after racial tensions at a NBOE meeting on November 22, 2022,” the complaint read.
Community demands the release of Global Studies report
Akela Hayne’s claim isn’t the first time the district has faced a potential lawsuit over allegations of racial harassment at the high school.
In June 2023, former Global Studies English teachers Tammy Davis and Nubia Lumumba said they “suffered severe emotional problems” leading them to seek “psychological counseling” after experiencing racial harassment during the 2022-23 school year. The former Newark teachers filed claims with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over racial discrimination against students and retaliation against Davis and Lumumba for complaining about the harassment, according to a letter from the department sent to León last December. The federal office launched an investigation on Dec. 21, 2023, which is ongoing.
Board members, including Haynes, have also been vocal about calling for the release of a scathing report that details the racial harassment and hostility students and staff experienced at Global Studies. In 2023, Haynes said the report was “traumatizing to read.”
The district has so far released three recommendations provided by the report that call on Newark to assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system and foster conversations about racial issues. But the report, commissioned by school board members in January 2023 and conducted by the consulting firm Creed Strategies, has remained private despite public records requests from Chalkbeat and calls from the community to release it.
In June 2023, León said the report was meant to inform the district’s strategy on race, but few details have been released about the district’s efforts to address the problems at the high school.
Last month, the Newark Teachers Union withdrew two lawsuits seeking the release of the report after reaching a deal with the district almost a year after filing its first case.
Union President John Abeigon, who spearheaded the lawsuit, wouldn’t disclose the terms of the agreement or say if the settlement would require the district to release the report to the union or the public.
The Newark Board of Education will meet on Thursday, Dec. 19 at 6 p.m. at East Ward Elementary School for its last meeting of 2024.
Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.
