School board vice president: ‘We are not going away’
NAACP leaders, others demand answers over superintendent’s sudden departure
Their message was clear: They aren’t letting the issue go.
“We are not going away,” said Lisa Conover, Allentown School Board vice president. “Our children are being put at risk.”
Conover was among the roughly dozen people who gathered in downtown Allentown on Saturday to continue their demand for answers about the abrupt departure of former Allentown School District superintendent John Stanford.
District parents, NAACP leaders and community activists have been vocal in both their support for Stanford,
who is Black, as well as their concern about why he left.
Those who spoke at Saturday’s protest again pointed to what they see as a troubling lack of transparency.
“The lack of transparency is key,” said NAACP Bethlehem President Esther Lee, flanked by protesters holding signs. “Why aren’t the leaders coming forward? It is shameful.”
On Oct. 20, the Allentown School Board voted 6-3 to approve a separation-and-release agreement with Stanford, who was hired to a five-year contract in September 2021 and started the job that November.
Stanford and the school board have refused to comment on the reason for his departure, beyond signing off on a joint statement saying the separation was mutual and amicable and did not involve any impropriety or misconduct. District employees are forbidden from making any statements about Stanford’s tenure “inconsistent with or contrary to” that statement, the agreement says.
He was the district’s fifth full-time superintendent since 2010.
On Oct. 25, community activists and NAACP leaders held their first protest, outside the Lehigh County Courthouse at Fifth and Hamilton streets. At that event, Lee, the first Black person elected to Bethlehem Area School Board in 1971, said the circumstances behind Stanford’s departure “unsettled” her, and accused the district of discrimination.
Lee said on Saturday she stood behind those assertions.
“Leadership doesn’t care about the brown and Black children,” Lee said. “You kicked out a brilliant Black man. Why the continued silence?”
On Oct. 27, the board, by unanimous vote, approved Carol D. Birks, a Connecticut educator and school executive, as interim superintendent. Birks, a 27-year education veteran, served most recently as regional superintendent and chief schools officer with Booker T. Washington Academy, in New Haven and Hamden, Connecticut. She has been a teacher and a principal, as well as a state and district leader. Birks is Black.
Allentown School Board officials have not said whether Birks is in the running to fill the superintendent role permanently.
Along with calling for transparency, those who participated demanded a forensic audit of the district’s finances over the last 30 years.
“We believe that will connect all the dots,” said Barbara Redmond, secretary of Women in the NAACP, or W.I.N.