Following another controversy in which his language was criticized as bigoted, Jack Chiaramonte is resigning from his seat on the Board of Education, the Hour reported.
Chiaramonte reportedly had posted a video on his Facebook page of a black teenager physically attacking a white teenager. With the video he posted a comment asking why President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Al Sharpton, all blacks, “why they don’t have anything to say” about the incident. He also called the three “racist scum.”
Responding on Facebook to comments about the post, Chiaramonte used profanities.
He was criticized for making racist comments in the post by, among others, Brenda Penn Williams, first vice president of the Norwalk NAACP, who last week called on him to resign. She recently announced that she is running for a seat on the Board of Education.
“[S]ome of the language in my post was inappropriate, which I regret, but I have never attacked any race or ethnic group.” Chiaramonte wrote in an email sent to The Hour, the newspaper reported.
In 2011, Chiaramonte made a comment that was criticized as anti-Semitic. During a controversy over a teacher’s union wage contract, Chiaramonte said some Norwalk teachers cared more “about a few extra shekels” than about the education of students. A shekel is a unit of Israeli currency. He apologized for that comment, but said he didn’t mean anything bigoted by it.
Chiaramonte also wrote, “[D]ue to my new job having travel obligations that will require me to be away for months at a time, it would be difficult to continue serving on the Board, and so I was thinking of resigning within the next few weeks.” But the latest controversy, he wrote, made him decide to resign.
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