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Pa. charter school leader blasts George Floyd protestors, then apologizes

  • Avi Wolfman-Arent/Keystone Crossroads
FILE PHOTO: A student serves up desert to classmates during lunch at the People for People Charter School, Monday, Feb. 25, 2013, in Philadelphia.

 Matt Rourke / AP Photo

FILE PHOTO: A student serves up desert to classmates during lunch at the People for People Charter School, Monday, Feb. 25, 2013, in Philadelphia.

The head of an influential Pennsylvania charter school advocacy group has apologized for a Facebook post about the ongoing civil rights protests in which she said: “these protesters disgust me. All lives matter!”

She later called her comments “insensitive and inappropriate” and said she meant to imply that the looting and violence that occurred last weekend disgusted her.

Ana Meyers, head of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, posted — and then deleted — a statement on her personal Facebook page in which she called the protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd “not okay.”

Meyers’ original post linked to an emergency alert that mentioned “violent protests” in Philadelphia.

When Keystone Crossroads contacted Meyers, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., to ask about the post, she said that she’d removed the original statement and posted an apology.

She also said that she meant only to suggest that the violent protests disgusted her — not the majority of the protests, which have been peaceful.

“I support the protest,” said Meyers, who is Hispanic and an immigrant. “I support the Black Lives Matter movement. What I do not support is looting and destruction.”

“I did not mean to insinuate that I don’t support Black Lives Matter,” she added. “That never crossed my mind.”

Sharif El-Mekki, a longtime charter-school principal who now runs an organization dedicated to increasing the number of Black male educators, said the apology would “fall on deaf ears.”

“This is why ‘charter schools’ in and of itself are not enough,” El-Mekki said. “The fact that people demanding to not be murdered in the streets by police disgusts her, tells you that anything Black families rail against short of murder will also disgust her.”

Black students make up the plurality of charter school students in Pennsylvania. Across the state, roughly 60 percent of students in charter schools are either black or hispanic.

Meyers’ organization is the primary lobbying group for the state’s charter-school sector, which educates over 140,000 students statewide.

The coalition’s vice president, Larry Jones, who is Black and runs a charter school in Philadelphia, said Meyers’ original post was fueled by “emotion and reaction.”

“I’m seeing that all over the place,” Jones said. “I want to get past the post and into true systemic reform and change.”

He added that Meyers’ work supporting charter schools was part of the systemic change he hoped to see.


Keystone Crossroads is a statewide reporting collaborative of WITF, WPSU and WESA, led by WHYY. This story originally appeared at https://whyy.org/programs/keystone-crossroads.

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