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Parents advocate, district plans to address continued racism towards Sewanhaka athletes

Screenshot 2025-07-21 at 6.28.21 AM
Sheldon
Isabella Gallo

In response to Sewanhaka parents pushing for the district to respond to racist incidents against Elmont student-athletes at the hands of Bellmore-Merrick students and spectators, the district has formed a committee to address the issue.

“This initiative is part of our ongoing commitment to ensuring that all students feel safe, valued, and respected in every aspect of their educational experience, particularly within our co-curricular and athletic programs,” Sewanhaka Superintendent Regina Agrusa said in a statement. “The committee’s mission is to foster a positive and inclusive culture of care proactively and looks to prevent incidents of harassment, intimidation, bullying, and microaggressions.”

The committee, called HEART, or the Healing, Education and Response Team, will consist of 10 people, including students, coaches, clinicians, teachers, and administrators from each of the district’s five schools. It will also welcome parent advocates who want to listen in on discussions. 

Sewanhaka’s HEART plan involves a district-wide initiative prioritizing leadership development and racial awareness training for coaches and student-athletes, as well as a thorough training on the Sewanhaka District Code of Conduct and policies related to New York’s Dignity for All Students Act, according to emails provided to Schneps Media LI.

The district will also work to train and support coaches in making real-time decisions, including removing teams or players mid-game in response to on-field incidents, address students’ racial trauma, establish clear reporting and launch a culture of care awareness campaign, according to emails.

Parents, particularly those associated with the Elmont Dad’s Club, have ramped up advocacy on the issue this past spring semester. Their increased advocacy was partially spurred by a white Bellmore-Merrick student hitting a Black Elmont student during a February basketball game and a similarly racially charged incident in an April lacrosse match between the two schools. 

“I feel like children should not have to engage in these kinds of things when they’re trying to get an education, when they’re trying to play sports,” said Mickheila Jasmin-Beamon, a parent with students in Elmont’s elementary school. “Racial trauma should not be something students graduate with. I want them to graduate with honors. I want them to graduate with a new outlook on life.”

Some parents, including Beamon, have pushed for Sewanhaka to stop matches with Bellmore-Merrick, calling them a hazard to students’ well-being and mental health.

“If you have students who are going up against Bellmore-Merrick and they have these repeated issues, you stop sending our students,” said Beamon, a civil rights attorney. 

Beamon said she believes any plan should have more of a focus on Bellmore-Merrick students and coaches than Sewanhaka’s, as it is those students who are responsible for racist incidents. She emphasized that district plans have not stopped racist incidents from taking place to date.

“[Sewanhaka’s] response is constantly telling us about all of the initiatives that we have done to fix the issue internally,” Beamon said. “They’re talking about all the training, talking about all the T-shirts and all the things that we’re teaching our students. But our students are not the offenders. You’re not going to be able to stop these issues this way.”

She said she was frustrated to see the racist incidents and games against Bellmore-Merrick continue, particularly because she intentionally moved to Elmont, which she sees as an accepting community, to raise her children, yet that had not stopped racism from other parts of the county creeping in and impacting her family.

The district has no plans to stop playing Bellmore-Merrick, it said in a statement and during multiple school board meetings, as it wants to implement the HEART Committee instead. Sewanhaka said it identified a need for the HEART committee in late winter after parents spoke at a March board meeting, following the February basketball game incident.

Sheldon Meikle, a member of the Elmont Dad’s Club, spoke in support of the district pulling out of matches with Bellmore-Merrick during that school board meeting. Now, in July, he said he had faith in the district’s new approach to addressing the issue and believed the two districts should continue playing matches, at least for now. 

“We’re definitely moving in the right direction, but we still have a ways to go,” Meikle said. “We’re giving them the opportunity to make it right.”

Meikle said he hoped to see effective, productive and swift action from the HEART Committee. 

“I would like to see that the coaches take the issue more seriously. I’d like to see more reporting so we can have the data to see how frequently this is occurring,” Meikle said. “I would like to see that the coaches are taking a hands-on approach to stopping these games when these incidents occur. We also don’t want our students to suffer in silence. We want them to feel confident that if they speak up they’re not going to be reprimanded or disciplined or benched and not be able to play if they do.”

“We have students who, 10, 20, 30 years later, have PTSD or mental stress. They suffer in silence. We have to take a look at the coaches. We have to take a look at the refs. We have to take a look at the system and try to fix the problem,” Meikle said. He added that his son, who graduated in 2020, told him he experienced racist taunts during football games but never raised the issue with the district.

If Sewanhaka were to stop playing Bellmore-Merrick, it could complicate the district’s status and scheduling within Section VIII, the organization that manages high school sports in Nassau County.

“The safety and well-being of all students is our highest priority,” Agrusa said in a statement. “We are continuing to work closely with our school community, as well as our neighboring districts, to address these matters directly and ensure that all students feel safe, supported and respected. Our collective goal is to create a culture of care where every student can participate fully without fear of harassment.”

HEART Committee members went through a training process in early June, and the first meeting will be sometime in late August. Implementation of the program is roughly scheduled for the beginning of the 2025-26 school year. The committee plans to meet once a month through the school year.

Laura Harding, an attorney and past president of Erase Racism, said she had been asked by Sewanhaka parents in 2023 to come up with a plan for the district to address the same issue then, in her former capacity with the organization. It included a focus on anti-racism training and Bellmore-Merrick students and coaching staff.

“It laid out training for students. It laid out training for the appropriate staff members. It also laid out a response with the students [involved],” Harding said of her 2023 plan. She said her proposal also called for restorative justice, asking that the offending Bellmore-Merrick students not simply be punished, but pushed to learn from the incident, understand the experience and culture of the Elmont students on the other side of their words and why their actions were hurtful.

Harding said Sewanhaka turned it down in favor of addressing the issue themselves.

The district wasn’t the only entity to turn down one of her plans on the matter. Harding also presented a comprehensive, county-wide plan to address racism in high school sports to Section VIII last month. She submitted the plan in response to the ongoing issues between Sewanhaka and Bellmore-Merrick and a lawsuit filed by the Roosevelt School District against the Wantagh and Lynbrook School Districts over similar racist incidents in 2023 at the request of Roosevelt’s attorney. 

Harding said her proposed plan was based on the Safe Passage Program, which is meant to ensure students travel to and from school safely. It involved anti-racism training and workshops for students, superintendents, athletic directors, coaches and sporting officials meant to break down stereotypes, help people understand different cultures and improve conflict resolution with opportunities to practice interventions. 

Section VIII turned it down a few weeks after she submitted it, saying the plan “went too far”, according to Harding. She said Section VIII told her it would offer a one-time training program to be attended by athletic directors only. 

“It’s being signaled that [Sewanhaka] should only do the basic minimum,” Harding said.  

The Bellmore-Merrick School District and Section VII did not return requests for comment.