Parents demand answers about knife incident in second-grade classroom at Riley Avenue

The mother of a Riley Avenue second-grader who was the apparent target in a stabbing scheme hatched by two classmates complained to the board of education last night about the administration’s handling of the incident.

Rhonda Trent, of Calverton, took the podium at last night’s school board meeting to complain publicly about what the administration did — and did not do — after a student in Jutta Mariotti’s second-grade classroom brought a pocket knife to school last fall.

According to a Riverhead police report, a boy brought a pocket knife to school on a dare  by another boy to bring a knife to school and stab a third child, Trent’s son.

“No one ever contacted me,” Trent told the board. “I haven’t had any answers to the questions I’ve continued to raise with the board,” she said.

“Did anyone ever find the knife?” Trent asked.

Riverhead School superintendent Nancy Carney said the board was not free to discuss the case.

“Once again, ma’am, we have privacy rights. It is part of a file that is not public,” Carney told Trent.

Trent submitted a list of questions and signed petitions to the board demanding answers.

Terri Nirrengarten, of Baiting Hollow, the mother of another child in Mariotti’s class, asked why parents were not notified of the incident.

“I had to find out from my 8-year-old daughter that two boys were suspended because they brought a knife to school,” Nirrengarten said. That comment led to an exchange with the superintendent.

“We have situations that occrur throughout the district all the time,” Carney replied. “Students make bad choices. They make mistakes. We deal with it on an everyday basis. If we notified parents every time, that’s all we’d be doing,” Carney said.

“This is a serious incident,” Nirrengarten said.

“We deal with serious incidents all the time,” Carney answered.

Riverside resident Robert Brown admonished the board for the district’s handling of the incident, which he said was influenced by Trent’s race.

Brown said Riley Avenue Elementary School — which has, by far, the smallest minority population of all the district elementary school buildings — has a reputation in the community for being “racist.”

Riley’s student population is 72 percent white, according to district demographic statistics. None of the other three elementary buildings comes even close to that ratio: Aquebogue’s student body is 50 percent white, Roanoke’s is 27.6 percent white and Phillips Avenue is just 15.9 percent white. District-wide, white students make up 48 percent of the student body, with Hispanics at 33.4 percent and blacks at 15.3 percent.

“Even with Ms. Trent’s son. I think she was not treated as an equal parent in the incident with her son,” Brown said.

“I think the board and anybody that’s concerned with the Riverhead community — it’s not just a Riley Avenue thing, its a Riverhead thing,” Brown said.

“We have to stop with this dumb stuff that happens in Riverhead on the racial plane. It’s crazy. It doesn’t make sense to treat people the way people are treated in Riverhead in 2014. It’s insane. We have to look at people as people. There has to be changes in Riverhead,” he said.

Trent said after the meeting that her son is the only African American child in his classroom. There was another African American student in the class at the beginning of the school year, but she moved, Trent said.

The two students involved in the knife incident were overheard by either another student or the classroom teacher — Trent said she’s heard conflicting reports — and they were sent to the principal, she said. One of the boys was found to be in possession of a folding pocket knife, according to a police report.  The incident was first reported by the News-Review in March.

Trent said the principal never called her about the incident; she called him after she heard about it from someone else.

“That just isn’t right,” Trent said.

Both boys were suspended, but were allowed to return to school in January, Trent said — despite the district’s code of conduct which says “any student, other than a student with a disability, found guilty of bringing a weapon onto school property will be subject to suspension from school for at least one calendar year.” The code of conduct gives the superintendent discretion to “modify the one-year suspension on a case-by-case basis.”

The two boys and her son were friends, Trent said, making what happened even harder to understand. She said she has spoken with an attorney and is considering taking legal action against the district.

After the meeting, Brown wondered aloud whether the district’s repsonse would have been different had the situation been reversed — if a black child had been caught with a knife and the “target” had been a white boy. 

The lifelong Riverhead resident, age 73, said he believes things have actually declined for blacks in the Riverhead community over the years, citing the lack of businesses owned an operated by African Americans today.

“You can go from the expressway to 105, and there’s a total absence of — us,” Brown said. “And I don’t think it’s an accident.”