Presidential candidate cancels visit after Lighthouse College Prep students threaten walkout
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz had no idea what he’d bargained for when he scheduled a campaign stop at the Bronx Lighthouse College Prep Academy in Longwood on April 6, two weeks before the New York primaries. Chynajah Lewis, a senior at the school, says it was a Monday she’ll never forget.
“My principal came the last two minutes of government class and she said, ‘how would you react if I told you that Ted Cruz was going to come?’ and we all reacted with anger,” Lewis said.
“We were like, ‘we don’t want him to come here – why can’t we get Bernie to come?’” she added.
Student opposition to the proposed visit prompted a two-day flurry of defiance that included making signs, writing an angry letter to their principal, Alix Duggins and planning a walkout.
Students say it was their organizing combined with the power of their pens that led to the cancellation. The Cruz campaign blamed the schedule change on state testing at the school.
The decision brought the school national attention and the students’ rejection of the conservative candidate won the widespread admiration of many in the Bronx, where Republicans account for only 37,000 of 632,000 active registered voters.
“I think it’s good because it shows they’re politically conscious,” said Bronx resident Steven Marsh, 67, adding, “He’s trying to play on his name ‘Cruz’ and slide in to get voters.”
Mabel Correra, a mother of two, agreed. “Ted Cruz wouldn’t be good because there’s a lot of Hispanics and immigrant people in this neighborhood,” she said, adding that she doubts he could serve her family or her community, given his stance on immigration. Cruz has advocated building a border wall, increasing deportations and ending birthright citizenship.
Young people at Bronx Lighthouse College Prep Academy called Cruz’s views alarming and said they worked together to stop the visit because many of the school’s students and families are immigrants.
“We decided to write a letter to our principal saying we don’t feel comfortable having him in a school that’s mainly black and Latino – that’s not something we stand for,” said junior Maleena Hernandez, 16, who co-wrote the letter.
Hernandez said students were prepared to take further action if Cruz hadn’t canceled. “We organized how we were going to walk out of school and sit in front and have our silent protest,” she said.
Lewis said their strategy was to “make a human wall to prevent him from coming in, because he wants to make a wall to prevent immigrants from coming in,” adding that students were ready to accept any disciplinary consequences that might have resulted from their walkout.
She said both students and teachers were upset by the itinerary Cruz had proposed for the visit, which called for no interaction with them.
“He was planning to just come, meet with the principal, take a tour of the school and leave,” she said, adding, “My teacher, she was so angry, she was like ‘he don’t even care about us, he just wants to get a picture with one black kid to make it seem like he actually cares.’”
Students weren’t the only ones who would have been excluded from interacting with the candidate. New York State Senator Ruben Diaz Sr. (D) said he wasn’t invited and only learned of Cruz’s visit to the school after it was canceled. He said he received a call Tuesday evening asking him to plan something to fill the 20 minutes that Cruz would have spent at the school.
Diaz, who said he has invited all of the presidential candidates from both parties to the district, quickly organized a meeting with Hispanic ministers at Sabrosura Restaurant in Soundview.
“There was a time nobody wanted to come to the Bronx, he said. “Now everybody wants to come to the Bronx.” He said he could not comment on Cruz’s school visit because by the time he found out about it, it was canceled.
A spokeswoman for Cruz, Catherine Frazier, said the campaign initiated the event.
“We cancelled the tour because parents issued concerns about potential protests,” said Frazier in an email. “It was a testing day and out of respect to the students and school we did not want to cause unnecessary distractions.” She said the school notified the campaign about potential problems with the visit.
A calendar for the Bronx Lighthouse Charter School, which serves students in kindergarten through 8th grade and is located next door, indicates New York State testing was scheduled for grades 3 – 8. The school could not be reached for comment.
Bronx Lighthouse College Prep Academy Principal Alix Duggins would not comment on the visit.
A representative from the school’s national network, Lighthouse Academies, Inc, said the national leadership team had no comment.
Lewis said that although she was thrilled that students succeeded in stopping the visit, she was angered by reports that student testing led to the cancellation.
“It made it seem like the reason why he didn’t come was because we were test-taking,” she said. “But that wasn’t the case. We didn’t want him here.”