SEOC Biographies
SEOC Welcomes New Executive Director, Elizabeth Smith
At the end of 2010, SEOC welcomed a new Executive Director, Elizabeth “Liz” Smith, after the retirement of founding director Dennis Brunn. Liz had been involved with SEOC for many years before applying for the new position; she served for several years as the Secretary and then the Treasurer of our Board of Directors. But working with SEOC was not exactly her introduction to community organizing. She first became involved in organizing around community and education issues in her town of Plainfield, and it was this work that brought her in contact with SEOC.
When her daughter was just in pre-school, about 10 years ago, Liz started looking for ways to get involved in her community, and she was interested in pursuing a career in teaching. A neighbor told her about an exciting communit yengagement project in Plainfield revolving around citing a new middle school, and Liz volunteered for the committee of community members.
The work expanded into an extensive community development project and led to the development of a neighborhood group, where Liz learned a tough lesson in building organization. “In hindsight, we were so focused on working on this project that we neglected the development of the group,” Liz says, explaining that this is in part whys she's “so intent on developing an individual donor base” for SEOC.
Though she had become involved in a wide variety of issues, including housing and social services, Liz felt increasingly drawn to working in education. “I still felt that education was the key. The more time I spent looking at the issues around education and what I thought was needed, I just decided this is where I wanted to focus my attention now,” Liz explains. It was at this point that Liz became heavily involved in SEOC. She has served a variety of positions with us, but regardless of the task, she gained a reputation for being dependable, hard-working, warm, and eve- calm in the face of conflict.
In her current position, Liz is working to balance fundraising, membership growth, and other big-picture issues of organizational development, while keeping in touch with the local organizing issues and the day-to-day experiences of the organizers and parent leaders.
It is clear that Liz's greatest source of motivation is still her fellow parent leaders. She says, “I do believe that parents are their children's best advocates. When we prep a parent to make a testimony or speak to the press, that's where I feel incredible pride about the work that we do. We're giving parents an opportunity to really express themselves and be heard because they are prepared and they have knowledge.”
Ms. McFadden passed away on May 28, 2011. She made a tremendous contribution to SEOC and to her local chapter, PCUE. We will miss her greatly. The following bio was written in the winter of 2009.
Meet LueElla McFadden
President of SEOC's Jersey City Chapter
Parents and Communities United for Education (PCUE)
LueElla McFadden, the president of Parents and Communities United for Education (PCUE), our Jersey City chapter, has been involved in the schools as an advocate for children for almost forty years. Over those years, she has been a parent to twelve children, including her own, her sister's children after her sister passed away, and other children she has taken in who needed a parent.
One of LueElla's earliest challenges came when her daughter was in elementary school, PS 22, in Jersey City and was having difficulty learning. Instead of addressing the problem, the teacher placed LueElla’s daughter at the back of the class and ignored her, despite LueElla’s many complaints and visits to the school.
LueElla finally got the district to pay for bus transport for her daughter to attend school in the Heights neighborhood, which at the time was all white. When her children started attending school there, they were the only students who weren’t white.
Many years and experiences with school involvement later, she became involved again in PS 22 when her granddaughter attended school there. At that time and again when she became active at Lincoln HS, parents met outside the school, often at LueElla’s workplace at the medical center after hours, to talk about issues. The Lincoln parents discussed concerns about what happened to students after they were labeled as “special ed.” The students who were labeled attended school not just in separate classrooms but in a whole separate wing of the school; they were treated differently, and it was affecting them negatively. One of the children LueElla was taking care of stopped showing up to school, and she only found out because the VP of the PTA told her; the school never contacted her.
LueElla and other parents became involved in the campaign for “inclusion” of special education children, talking to the principal and Board of Education and even writing letters to the legislature. About ten years ago, she started to notice the spread of “inclusion” classrooms, and she considers it one of the biggest victories in school reform that she's been a part of, though she thinks the underlying problem of negative labeling hurting special education children is still with us.
The history of LueElla’s involvement in the schools is far too long to include in detail here, but when PCUE was founded, many of the people she had worked with over the years remembered her commitment and work ethic, and all SEOC members and staff consider ourselves lucky to have her as our Jersey City chapter president.
Asked what she’s the most proud of about PCUE, LueElla said, “It’s like watching a child grow and change. I see how we have grown and what we have accomplished. I love coming here.”
Meet Tina Cintron
President of SEOC 2006-2009
Vice President of SEOC 2010-11
Parent Leader from Newark
Tina's first experience with organizing for change came when she was in her twenties and joined her boyfriend in a successful sit-in to demand that their New York City church provide daycare for the community. Her boyfriend was active in the Young Lords, an organization devoted to grassroots community service and improvement, and she saw first-hand how the group's service and organizing could affect the community.
Many years later, a homeowner in the north ward of Newark and married to that boyfriend, Tina was disturbed that her neighborhood lacked basic public services. On garbage collection days the cans were strewn across the street rather than put back in place, and sometimes people had to pay bribes to get their garbage picked up. Even worse, although there was a car stolen or a car accident on her street nearly every day, the only time police were visible there was when they were ticketing cars for illegal parking during street sweeping.
So Tina founded the North End Community Association, NECA, to gather residents for meetings with local city officials. When they met with the official in charge of garbage collection and she told him she was sure the emptied cans were not thrown into the street the same way in Caldwell, his only response was, “Over here in Newark, it's different.” Remembering that moment, Tina says: “I got so angry at the garbage director. I couldn't believe he had the audacity to say that to me. My daughter was in the meeting and you should have seen her face.”
Over the years, Tina and NECA fought for numerous other improvements as well. Not all the problems were addressed as fully or promptly as the group would have liked. A four-way stop sign was installed at a dangerous intersection thanks to the group’s efforts, but a local establishment that they wanted to have close at midnight because it was a known haven for late night drug transactions agreed to the earlier closing only after drug activity on the corner led to a fatal shooting. But now, without its post-midnight hours, the establishment is no longer the site of drug activity. However difficult the battles seem, Tina is firmly committed to the principle that officials need to know that “people are looking to see what they're doing.”
Through her work with NECA, Tina met Pat Jelly, who was SEOC's Lead Organizer for our Newark chapter until February of 2009. Tina joined Pat on an ONEC campaign to save land down the street from Tina’s house that had been designated for a rebuilt school. When the New Jersey school construction program ran out of money, plans for hundreds of schools got stuck in the pipeline and private developers bought up much of the land on which they were to have been built. To prevent that from happening in her neighborhood, Tina attended city hall meetings with about 10 other parents from ONEC on numerous occasions before they were finally given an opportunity to speak. They would sometimes stay until 11:00 pm before having to go home, but they kept returning, demonstrating the persistence that is a hallmark of Tina’s approach. Once when she tried to put fliers in the old school to recruit parents to the effort, the principal prevented her and said, “That school will never be built.” But thanks in large part to Tina’s vision and persistence, he was proven wrong; the new school has been up and running for a year now.
Tina’s efforts have always been motivated by a sense of fairness rather than self interest Her daughter, who is now a student at Rutgers, once reported that only a few kids in her middle school class got textbooks and the rest had to borrow the books from them in order to do the homework. When Tina went to the principal to complain about the situation, he gave one of the few books to her daughter. “That's not what I wanted. All the kids should have had a book,” Tina recalls. It was an early lesson for her in the importance of working in a group.
SEOC is extremely fortunate to have a leader as committed, effective, and inspiring as Tina. Unfailingly warm, energetic, and strong throughout all of the ups and downs of our organizing efforts, she has been the backbone of our organization, drawing other parents in and keeping them going. She says she learned the hard way that promises from people in power are sometimes a tactic to get community members to stop fighting, so you have to get the promises in writing, set a deadline, and keep pushing. Asked why she gives so much of herself to organizing with SEOC, she speaks of having found like-minded leaders and organizers in SEOC. “We're doing such great work and it's so important. The kids are everything,” says Tina.
