Former Park Slope principal accused of communism can move forward with lawsuit, judge says

A former Brooklyn principal who was investigated on suspicions of communist activity recently won a small legal victory in her lawsuit against the city's Department of Education.

Jill Bloomberg is suing the department, which she said retaliated against her for speaking out against racial discrimination. The city has been fighting her lawsuit in court for years.

Last month, a judge ruled that her case can move forward — a decision that comes at a time when educators across the country are facing heightened scrutiny about their perceived political beliefs.

“This is a matter that could have been resolved with a meeting with Jill Bloomberg and the superintendent,” said Arthur Eisenberg, executive counsel of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which urged the Department of Investigation to stop its probe back in 2017. “It could have been resolved in an hour. It has now taken years. And that’s unfortunate, to say the least.”

A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Law Department declined to comment. In court papers, the city has denied wrongdoing.

For about 15 years, Bloomberg served as the principal of Park Slope Collegiate, a school for sixth through 12th graders just blocks from the western edge of Prospect Park.

“I loved my job,” she said during a recent interview. “I loved the students. I loved the interactions with the teachers.”

But Bloomberg retired ahead of schedule in early 2020.

“I was no longer doing the job that I wanted to do, and I wasn't doing it well,” she said.

Bloomberg said her career started to unravel in 2017 as she grew frustrated that her students, who were mostly Black and Latino, didn't have enough sports teams. The boys really wanted a soccer team, she said, but the department kept denying their requests.

For years, Park Slope Collegiate had shared its building — and its sports teams — with several other small schools that were also mostly Black and Latino. Those and another nearby school had nine combined sports teams as of January 2017, according to Bloomberg’s lawsuit.

But another school, Millennium Brooklyn High School, had moved into the same building a few years earlier and didn’t join the existing sports teams. Instead, they played with students from Millennium’s Manhattan campus.

About half of Millennium Brooklyn’s students were Black and Latino at the time, while just a quarter of the Manhattan campus’s students were Black and Latino, according to Bloomberg’s lawsuit. She found that Millennium had 17 sports teams — nearly double the amount as the rest of the schools — even though they had fewer students.

“I was like, ‘What is going on here?’” Bloomberg remembered thinking to herself.

The Park Slope Collegiate principal had long been outspoken about what she saw as racial discrimination against her students. She called for the removal of the school's metal detectors. She criticized disciplinary policies that she thought were overly punitive and harmful to students of color. With the sports teams, she said, she'd had enough.

So, on Jan. 10, 2017, Bloomberg wrote a letter to the official who oversaw school sports. She said the Department of Education was segregating students and should combine the teams. The letter also included a chart with the number of students at each school that shared athletic facilities, the percent of students who were Black and Latino, and the number of sports teams they had.

A couple months later, Bloomberg learned she was under investigation.

According to an investigative report filed in the court docket, a confidential complainant had accused her of trying to recruit students to join the Progressive Labor Party, a political organization associated with the Communist Party. The complainant also raised concerns about movies that were screened at the school and flyers found in the building about a Black Lives Matter march and a May Day rally.

School officials have said in court papers that they were investigating whether Bloomberg violated a policy that restricts political activity in New York City public schools. Teachers and administrators are supposed to “maintain a posture of complete neutrality” regarding political candidates and are barred from campaigning during work hours, the policy states.

Bloomberg denied being a member of the Progressive Labor Party or recruiting students to join. She also said in an affidavit that her students “disagree with me often and with much confidence.”

Officials ultimately found Bloomberg did not violate the political activity policy, according to the investigative report, which said the complainant “failed to provide any evidence.” But the report states that investigators did substantiate a few other charges against her, including that she failed to ensure a documentarian who filmed in the school got permission from students and staff, and that she allowed a substitute teacher to fill in at the school for two days who wasn’t authorized. She was disciplined with a written reprimand, according to her lawsuit.

Even though Bloomberg was cleared of the most serious allegations, she said, she decided to leave her job anyway.

“I felt like this is never going to end,” she said. “If I'm the principal of this school, it's just going to be death by a thousand cuts over and over and over and over again.”

After Bloomberg retired, school administrators decided to unite all the students in the school building into one athletics program, including the Millennium students. WNYC and the student journalism nonprofit The Bell documented the girls varsity volleyball team’s first season playing together in the podcast “Keeping Score.”

The Department of Education has denied retaliating against Bloomberg and has said the complaint that prompted the investigation was lodged against her months before she wrote her letter about the sports teams.

Derek Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina Law School who specializes in education law, said the law is clear that school employees shouldn't be punished for complaining about discrimination. But he said teachers and administrators don't have the same free speech rights as their students. He said many people who work in schools are afraid to talk about controversial topics like race, especially now, when the education system is under so much scrutiny.

“There's still that, that fear, right? That if I say the wrong thing, I could get in trouble, even if it's not banned by law,” Black said.

City lawyers have tried to get Bloomberg’s lawsuit dismissed. But last month, a judge ruled that she had made a strong enough case at this point that she could proceed.

There's likely still a long legal process ahead. Bloomberg will have to either prove her case in court or convince the city to settle. But for now, she said, she's happy with this small win.