Mr. Louis Schuker, the principal at Jamaica High, had a long talk with me and Coach Ellis. He said the odds of a 600 school student making it in a regular school environment were next to zero. His admonition to me was reminiscent of the one given by the judge who had sentenced me to the 600 school.
Among New York City students with disability labels today, most are in the category of “learning disability.” This category came into existence in the 1960s, when parent advocates, educators, and psychologists wanted to figure out how to understand students who were struggling with skills like reading or arithmetic, but who did not otherwise seem to have intellectual disabilities.1 Dyslexia, for example, is one kind of learning disability.
Disabled students have always attended New York City schools, whether they were identified as disabled or not. Unfortunately, almost all of the ways New York City schools have tried to support Disabled students have involved students’ being separated from their peers. Students have attended separate schools, separate classrooms within schools, or have been pulled out of classrooms for part of the day. They have faced barriers to their full participation – like architectural barriers, or a lack of accommodations or teacher support. As a result, many students have felt that they were being treated differently – and less well than – their peers without disability labels.
In 1977, the New York City Board of Education was the focus of the “largest civil rights investigation of a public educational institution ever undertaken.” The Office of Civil Rights in the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare studied the New York schools and found that the school system had “violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin; Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex; and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination against physically or mentally handicapped individuals.”
Like many Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Evelina López Antonetty was frustrated that so many Spanish-speaking children were not learning to read. Many were being placed in classes intended for students with disabilities because they spoke Spanish. “I began to see the schools as an island,” Antonetty recalled, “After 3 o’clock, the school officials closed the doors and left the community. They made no input into the community. There were no teachers in the school from the community.”1
Organizing in the early 1960s by the Citywide Committee on Integration and by Reverend Milton Galamison had increased public attention to the “600” schools. After newspaper coverage of misconduct by teachers and administrators at a “600” school in Brooklyn, as well as criticism over the schools being racially segregated, the Board of Education created a special committee to study conditions inside these schools. After two years of study, the report, “‘600’ Schools Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," was delivered to the superintendent of schools in September 1966. The report acknowledged that the “600” schools were “ethnically unbalanced” and attributed this imbalance to the “many social problems and pressures to which these children are exposed,” rather than “mental illness.” While acknowledging that many problems existed within the “600” school system, the committee also highlighted the strengths of the program and the number of students who moved through the system, many of whom were considered “rehabilitated” and returned to the regular school system. They cited a need for more funding, personnel, and training to address the problems and improve the system.
The 1965 boycott targeted segregation in New York City’s junior high schools and “600” schools. But for 2000 students - primarily Black and Puerto Rican boys - who attended the “600” day schools, those schools were places they were sent because they were labeled by the schools as “socially maladjusted” or “emotionally disturbed.” Some of the students had been ordered to attend these schools after interactions with the police and the juvenile legal system. Most students did not find a supportive educational environment there, and those who had disabilities did not receive the support they needed.
In the fall of 1964, months after the massive February 1964 boycott, Reverend Milton Galamison and the Citywide Committee on Integration launched another boycott. Galamison and the Citywide Committee - which included CORE (Congress On Racial Equality), Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York Schools, Harlem Parents’ Committee, EQUAL, and the Negro Teachers Association - focused on the city’s junior high schools and the “600” schools, which had inadequate facilities, no curriculum, untrained teachers, and improperly screened students. The groups’ demands included promoting many more Black and Puerto Rican teachers to leadership positions like school principal, desegregating junior high schools, and improving the “600” schools. Reverend Galamison was arrested for violating state education laws by “encouraging truancy” when young people stayed out of school to boycott.
In late 1963, The Amsterdam News reported on allegations that teachers and administrators at P.S. 614 in Brooklyn, one of the city’s “600” schools. The teachers being investigated allegedly pocketed over 40,000 subway tokens meant for students. Instead of handing the tokens out, students were forced to perform menial tasks like washing cars or shining shoes to earn the tokens back. Not only were students being mistreated, they were being denied education. The school’s principal and administrators didn’t offer any information at the time but were later reassigned to a different school.
