It's a Thursday night in December 2019. We're in a non-descript government building on

Suttford Boulevard in Queens, New York, in a meeting room with a drop ceiling and

fluorescent lights. And the room is packed. Every chair is filled and parents are standing

in the back and on the sides. There are many more parents crowded in the hallway just

outside the door. Security won't let them in. They say it's a fire hazard. This point

will call this meeting the order of the roll call. This is a meeting of the Community Education

Council for School District 28. Their meetings are usually small and sleepy. Not this one.

Vijay Ramdatin, president of the council, tries to start things off on a positive note.

I see some familiar faces and some new faces and some major faces, which is amazing. You're

in camera. But pretty quickly, he starts to lose the room. The way I've been running

the meeting is here for the past. Excellent.

Why don't you consider a canceling this meeting? I mean, why are there such a big burden?

I know. There he is. He's gonna say that. So if we're gonna talk and I'm gonna talk,

if you wanna speak, try to speak or speak. I don't wanna be rude. I just wanted to bring

that to our people. You are being rude. You are being rude. You're interrupting the next

whole meeting. You're interrupting the next meeting. Let him continue like a few words

going. If you were the parents, choose to speak over the other parent, that's what you choose.

That's your choice. Now we can make a meeting what you wanna make. You all scream and we

all yell and the meeting gets nice. The article for the meeting and they were screaming

and that's great. But when do we get? What exactly were these parents so

riled up about? The district 28 was selected by the city to get something called a diversity

plan. But no one knew exactly what this diversity plan would look like. When it finally came

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