For some odd reason, Schools Chancellor Harold Levy is feuding with Mayor Giuliani over the money for bilingual education, which is one of Levy’s pet projects. The chancellor insists that the program which is designed to use English and Spanish together to make Spanish speaking students more literate in English will not work unless Levy is granted the 75 million he says is required in order to make the program work.

Considering all sources; city, state and federal, in terms of monies thus far committed, there would be a 75-million short fall. Levy insists that unless this money is found somewhere that the bilingual program just won’t work. What this actually means is that given what has been promised from the state and federal budgets, New York City would have to come up with an additional 20 million in order to satisfy what Levy insists are the needs in order to make the bilingual program work.

Setting aside for a moment the merits of the bilingual education program as it has worked in the past, a 20-million short fall should not be such a huge problem if Giuliani would do the right thing and get off the money or, in the final analysis, Levy could find the money somewhere in his 12.3-billion school budget already out there.

True it is, the money should come directly from Giuliani. He has wasted more money than that on the proposed baseball stadiums for Manhattan and Brooklyn. Yet the mayor insists that he cannot find money for the needs of children. It would be easy if we were able to say that the mayor cannot find money for all the children of this city. With what we find as we look at school aid and how it is allocated, we must concur with those who say that Giuliani cannot find money for the places where most of the Black and Hispanic children go to school.

Levy is right in exploding about the bilingual short fall but it would be more productive if Levy would be more concerned about how he uses his 12-billion plus budget than he is about a 2-million short fall that could be made up, especially if he had done the work that he should have done in getting the City Council on his side.

Actually, there should be enough money left over in the New York City summer school program to fully fund the short fall in the bilingual education program but this is especially true because it is quite possible that one-quarter to one-half of those who were supposed to go to summer school — and were budgeted for — will never see the light of a single school day this summer. For whatever reason this is happening, the short fall in students will be there and thus a surplus for the system if these people count the way other people count. But one cannot always tell what kind of counting is being done at 110 Livingston St.

If the mayor can find a place to keep Blacks and Hispanics while making sure that whites in the outer boroughs get first cut and best cut at everything, Giuliani will certainly do it. His entire history has been one of denying that which is best and proper for the Black and Hispanic children of this city while making damn sure that the white ethnics of this city were taken good care of. This is not to suggest that Giuliani is merely a racist; it is to say that, racist or not, Giuliani clearly favors white people over any other kind of people on the face of the earth and his 40-billion budget, upon cursory examination, will suggest that this is precisely the way he has run this city for almost eight years.

Levy and Giuliani have only a few more months to fight, but we must remind Levy that Ninfa Segarra is Giuliani’s nominee to the board and she has become the board president. She is in Giuliani’s pocket, as are Irving Hamer (only God knows why, unless some form of corruption is involved, for he is the Manhattan representative), the Staten Island and Queens representatives to the board. What Giuliani wants from this board as presently constituted, he can get. Therefore, Levy is blowing in the wind if he believes that he can defeat Giuliani on an issue that has to do with the well-being or welfare of the Black and Hispanic communities of this city.

This, too, points up once more why Giuliani has to be removed from public office and a person of minority background be elected mayor of this city from the two groups that now make up the majority of citizens.

Giuliani has never cared what happens to us. He has made that clear in speech after speech, in forum after forum, on radio program after radio program and television program after television program. He has made no bones about it: Giuliani hates the majority community in this city and is willing to do anything and everything in his power in order to further diminish their power as well as what the current government of this city affords them.

Levy has gone along with almost all of the Giuliani programs. He has misled, stolen from Peter to pay Paul, stolen from the poor to give to the rich as is Giuliani’s mien and has complained bitterly about every single thing that has not gone his way, acting more like a petulant child than a former executive of Citibank. These may be some of the reasons he is no longer at Citibank, for it seems to us that a high-powered banker in this city makes one hell of a lot more money than any leader of the city’s Board of Education.

Considering how Levy has bitched about the perks that he would get on the board, including rent, we are led to believe that he may well be as poor as Giuliani. All that we can say about it is that they probably deserve one another.

Both Bill Thompson and Levy have been under the control of Randi Weingarten, chief of the teachers’ union, for they both believe that an endorsement by the teachers union for an immediate or future office is in their political best interest.

When it comes to corruption , though, particularly with the schools budget, Levy does not hold a candle to Giuliani and his own crew of thieves at City Hall and 110 Livingston St. When a new administration of the city of New York is sworn in, there has to be a thorough examination in order to find out what happened to the education budget during the years of Giuliani as well as the construction budget for schools under his regime. As any new administration goes down the list of what Giuliani and his minions wrought, it is easy to believe that they will find tens of millions of dollars that have gone into the pocketbooks of criminals, posing as vendors, with the approval of Giuliani.

As we indicated earlier, Giuliani is a crook, pure and simple. What makes it even more difficult to follow is that he is not an honest crook. He is a mean and evil crook; one who believes that everyone who walks in this city is stupid except one, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Giuliani must be removed.



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