A white Brooklyn charter-school social worker was isolated and sidelined by her black bosses and eventually fired by her supervisor, she claims in a lawsuit.
Social worker Jill Nawrocki, 33, began work at the Urban Dove school in Bedford-Stuyvesant in May 2012 — but when a new leadership team composed of three black administrators took over at the beginning of the 2013 school year, a “racial divide” settled over the school, according to court papers.
“I could have sent her to one of my two white social workers,” a black supervisor said when explaining how she barred Nawrocki from working with a Haitian student because she thought it would be better for the student’s mom to meet with a black staffer, according to the papers.
Nawrocki was canned after she reported that another female student had been beaten and sexually abused at home, angering the administrators because she went over their heads to report it after they ignored her, the papers state.
When principal Lewis Franklin Thomas III reprimanded Nawrocki for reporting the abuse, he told her, “I went to law school. I know the law. I didn’t get something off the Internet,” the court filing says.
Ironically, Thomas has been booted from education jobs in three cities for fabricating his résumé, according to the education-news site Chalkbeat.
Nawrocki’s attorney, Steven Morelli, bashed Urban Dove.
“When it’s reverse discrimination, it’s not any more acceptable than the common discrimination you see in most lawsuits,” said Morelli.
Urban Dove denied Nawrocki’s claims.
“We deny the claims alleged by this former staff member and we continue to be focused on the important work of getting our students back on track to graduation and academic success,” said the school’s board of trustees chief Michael Grandis.