ALLENTOWN, Pa. — An Allentown School Board member has been barred from attending an annual conference after she seized the microphone and criticized the host group for giving an award named after Pennsylvania's first Black school board director exclusively to white people.
Director Phoebe Harris said she has been barred from attending the rest of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association's annual meeting, which ends Tuesday at noon.
The association is a nonprofit organization that provides services, support and counsel to the state's 4,500 school board members.
During its annual awards dinner Sunday, held at Kalahari Resort in Monroe County, the PSBA presented its William Howard Day Award to Uri Monson, Pennsylvania's secretary of budget, Harris said.
The decision outraged Harris, who said the award has exclusively gone to white people since its creation in 2016.
"I told them shame on you. Shame on PSBA. I was traumatized."Phoebe Harris, Allentown School Board member
After a video played of Monson thanking the association for the honor — he was not in attendance — Harris walked onto the stage, grabbed the microphone and let loose.
"I told them shame on you. Shame on PSBA. I was traumatized," Harris said in an interview Monday.
William Howard Day was a printer, orator and abolitionist who became the first Black person employed by the state of Pennsylvania. He was involved in the Underground Railroad in Ohio; educated runaway slaves in Ontario, Canada; and was the keynote speaker of the first civil rights march in Washington, D.C., in 1865.
He was elected to the Harrisburg School Board in 1878, becoming the first Black person to serve as a school board director in Pennsylvania. He served a total of 18 years before dying in 1900.
According to the PSBA website, the award "seeks to recognize outstanding contributions to public education by individuals, groups or organizations across the commonwealth."
Race does not appear to be a factor in the recognition.
The website lists six past winners, including former state Sen. Pat Browne, R-Lehigh; former Auditor General Eugene DePasquale; and Rich Pourier, the former president of Church Mutual Insurance. None of the winners appears to be a person of color.
Harris, who is Black, said an award named after a prominent abolitionist should be awarded exclusively to Black people. If the association wants to recognize the contributions of others toward Pennsylvania's education, nearly any other name would be appropriate, she said.
She described the current set-up as racist behavior and a microaggression.
"Where's the sensitivity? Where's the DEI? Where is it?" Harris asked. "Once again, the PSBA is showing how obtuse they are."
Representatives of the PSBA did not return a phone call or email from LehighValleyNews.com seeking comment for this story Monday.
Dispute over ban
Harris said that the association cut the microphone as she spoke but that she continued to vent her frustrations to the assembled members. She estimated that she spoke for about two minutes before she left the podium and marched off the convention floor.
Harris returned to her hotel room at the resort, where she was informed by text that she had been barred from attending the rest of the annual meeting, she said.
She stormed back to the convention floor but was told by security that Nathan Mains, the association's chief executive officer, had ordered she not be let back in, Harris said.
Despite her anger at the association, she said she should still be allowed to attend the seminars and networking activities at the annual meeting. The Allentown School District pays dues so its directors can be members and paid for the registration fee so she could attend the event.
"I feel he did a modern-day lynching," said Harris, who was first elected to the Allentown School Board in 2017.
Harris said she had intended to use the annual meeting to speak with contractors, architects and other experts about the facility needs in Allentown schools. The district intends to build new schools and upgrade aging ones, and sitting down with these experts empower her to be a more effective school board director for her constituents, she said.
"I take my job as the building chair very seriously. Now he's not allowing me to do my job as a school board member," she said.
Melissa Reese, a spokeswoman for the Allentown School District, said the district was aware of the situation at Kalahari but declined to comment further.
It was not immediately clear if the district is advocating for Harris to be readmitted to the annual meeting.
School board President Andrene Brown-Nowell did not return a message seeking comment.
