New Jersey May Name School After Arab American Advocate Awadallah
City education officials are considering renaming School 6 in honor of Frank Lautenberg, Paterson’s native son who rose from working class roots to become a millionaire and served in the U.S. Senate for almost three decades.
District officials also may name Paterson’s newest school, being built near the corner of Marshall and Hazel streets, after Hani Awadallah, a forceful advocate for North Jersey’s Arab-Americans and a man who fought for improvements in the city’s education system.
Both men passed away during the past seven months, Awadallah in January at the age of 70, and Lautenberg in June at 89.
Board of Education President Christopher Irving plans to discuss those possible school names during his report Aug. 21.
In many ways, Lautenberg’s success as the son of a silk worker embodied the hardscrabble can-do spirit of Paterson’s glorious past, when its mills supplied America with guns, fabric and locomotives.
The late senator attended School 6 when his family lived on Carroll Street. Now the neighborhood has become one of Paterson’s most dangerous, an area where three people have been killed since the start of the summer.
School 6 has fallen on hard times as well, with student test scores so low that the state is threatening to take it over unless improvements are made. Next month, the school will be getting its fifth principal in the past four years.
Awadallah, meanwhile, embodied the Paterson of recent decades, a city of immigrants from dozens of countries, a place where strong-minded folks say what’s on their minds no matter what other people think.
As head of the Paterson-based Arab American Civic Organization, Awadallah guided the region’s Middle Eastern community in protests and celebrations. He also lobbied hard to try to force state officials to provide all Paterson school children with the resources they needed to get a good education, including the long-delayed project in the southern tip of the 2nd Ward that eventually may bear his name.
State officials recently awarded a construction contract for the new school and say it will be done by 2016.
Joe Malinconico
Paterson Press