MARLBORO — A Facebook comment and a like that followed it has left some members of the community demanding that a Marlboro K-8 School District Board of Education member resign.
At the board’s March 10 meeting, Vice President Victoria Dean told residents in a packed auditorium at the Marlboro Middle School, “I am not a racist.”
“I’m not against Muslims,” Dean said. “I’m not against Jews. I’m not against Indian people. I’m sorry, and it’s your decision whether you believe me or not.”
The issue involving Dean stemmed from an article she posted to her personal Facebook page in February.
The presence of the article on her page gained attention in the community in early March. The article was about administrators in a Connecticut school district giving students the day off in honor of certain Muslim holidays.
“Pandora’s box opened,” Dean wrote on that post.
One of Dean’s Facebook friends replied to the post with a derogatory slur targeted toward Muslims and President Barack Obama. Dean subsequently liked the comment.
At the March 10 meeting, Dean apologized for her actions, saying, “I am not a bigot or a racist. I will not let an inadvertent acknowledgment of another person’s comment on Facebook define who I am as a person or a board member.”
Dean defended the article she posted and said it was not posted with racist intentions, but rather out of a conversation board members recently had about whether to close Marlboro’s schools for the Chinese New Year holiday.
At the time, Dean voted against closing the school for the Chinese New Year. She said she did not want to make one culture’s holiday seem more important than another’s.
But members of the community — including students, parents, teachers, religious leaders and Mayor Jonathan Hornik — criticized Dean’s actions. Many people at the meeting demanded her resignation from the board.
“I am a proud Muslim, 100 percent,” student Nadine Youssef said. “I am not going to call you out on anything. I know nothing about you. I can’t say you are a horrible lady. I can’t say you are a nice lady. … You look like you could be friendly, but the action you took kind of contradicts my thoughts.”
Youssef proceeded to tell Dean about how she and her mother have been made fun of for their religion, adding, “The fact that me, a 14-year-old girl, has to stand in front of you and tell you what you did was wrong can’t be acceptable.”
Mohamed Elrais, president of the Marlboro High School Muslim Student Association, said Dean’s actions have made him “lose hope.”
“For someone to represent me, to be vice president of the Board of Education, and to share and like posts that represent and show her prejudice against Muslims — it’s unacceptable,” Elrais said.
He said, “We need you to look around and see there is a growing Muslim population in Monmouth County and the Marlboro area, and for you to do something like that, it’s unfathomable. … It’s actions like these that bring down the Muslim community in Marlboro High School, Marlboro Middle School and Marlboro Memorial Middle School. It affects us dramatically.”
Some attendees who spoke defended Dean. Resident Dana Carney said a Facebook like does not mean much.
“How many of you out there have seen your children in dance videos, or your friends’ children, and you have liked something?” Carney said. “You don’t always look at it. You don’t always read it. … I think things have been taken out of context and made to be a much bigger issue and more of a public witch hunt than focusing on the real issues we have here.”
But others, such as Rabbi Shira Stern of Temple Rodeph Torah, Marlboro, disagreed and said people need to closely monitor their social media activity.
“We live in a world where if you say something, you better be able to stand behind it. … I would ask that any future correspondence you have with comments on Facebook, or comments among board members, that you understand that every word you share touches someone else,” Stern said to Dean.
After more than an hour of discussion from the community, board member BonnieSue Rosenwald said she did not forgive Dean and made a motion for the board to ask Dean to step down.
“If anyone on this board has the guts to second my motion to force a vote, second my motion,” Rosenwald said. “And if you don’t have the guts to do it, that’s fine. At least I have the integrity to make the motion.”
None of the board members seconded Rosenwald’s motion, and a vote was not taken.
Later in the meeting, board member Jian Kao attempted to make a motion asking Dean to resign from the panel.
“My personal belief is that if a public servant made comments like that, we need to consider if you can serve the public,” Kao said.
But Board President Michael Lilonsky said because Rosenwald’s motion had already failed, the same motion could not be raised again until the next meeting.
After the meeting, resident Nagwa Awad said she felt like “absolutely nothing” came out of the conversation.
“I think [Dean] is just sorry she was caught, and if the school has a zero-bullying policy, this is bullying,” Awad said. “I think she should do the honorable thing and step down.”
Hornik said, “It is clear that bigotry is not tolerable in public service. Marlboro is a diverse place. We have a bunch of different cultures living together, and no elected or appointed official can demonstrate any kind of bigotry or racism in this town.”
Dean said the meeting taught her to be more diligent in the future.
“It does not define who Victoria Dean is,” she said. “It does not define me. I feel like I have represented all these children, and I stand by that. … Somebody asked, what are the consequences? Well, I think that was the consequence — for me to have to sit through that.”
Elrais, representing the high school’s Muslim Student Association, said of the Muslim community, “We will prosper. We will move past this, but we cannot take these things lightly, because it will become a norm.”