White principal accused of banning Black History Month suing former colleagues

By Blue Telusma

·December 13, 2019

Bronx principal Patricia Catania was said to have confiscated a project from students that was created for Black History month. (Photo courtesy of LinkedIn.)

A principal who was previously accused of creating a hostile and racially charged environment for both faculty and students at her New York school, is now suing on the grounds that she’s the real victim of racism.

According to the New York Daily News, in 2018, former Bronx Intermediate School 224 principal Patricia Catania, who is white, made headlines when it was reported that she banned faculty from taking part in creating curriculums centered around celebrating Black history.

In February of 2018 Catania allegedly stopped Black History Month celebrations, specifically prohibiting English teacher Mercedes Liriano-Clark from teaching lessons on the Harlem Renaissance and confiscated a poster about Lena Horne made by a student.

Now Catania is making claims that she was targeted for vocalizing her disdain for incompetent teachers on staff at the predominantly Black school. As a result the suit is now naming Liriano, two other black teachers at the school and two United Federation of Teachers employees, for alleging waging a “maligning, malevolent, and racist campaign” to have Catania ousted.

She also claims her only real crime was successfully cracking down on underperforming educators.

“Calling me a racist is not unlike calling Mahatma Gandhi a violent man — there are just no facts to support the charge; and I was well known to be the exact opposite of the grossly misapplied ‘racist’ label,” Catania says in a sworn declaration filed in Bronx Supreme Court. “However, none of this mattered to my cancellers. They decided I had to go, and that was that.”

The document offers her first public accounts of the controversy, maintaining she had no issue with, and even encouraged Black History Month curricula, however Liriano, “had an extensive disciplinary history” and was teaching without a lesson plan.

“I advised her that she simply needed an adequate lesson plan if she was going to teach this subject, which she did not have,” explained the former principal. “In response to my benign and wholly proper suggestions, and my cordial reminders of her professional and contractual obligations, Ms. Liriano immediately went on a loud tirade throughout the hallway and main office of the school, screaming words to the effect that I could not tell her she could not teach Black History.”

Catania’s attorney Anthony Gentile also alleged that the smear campaign against his client was sparked because the faculty at the school wanted to replace her with a principal of “African or Caribbean ethnicity.”