While not every American is eligible to serve on Connecticut’s boards of education, New Haven residents recently showed up en masse to demand that non-US citizens be allowed to serve on New Haven’s city boards and commissions.

Like Hartford last year, New Haven is currently undergoing a city charter revision process.  Last month it was recommended to the charter revision commission that the city charter be changed to allow non-US citizens to serve on local board and commissions, which would include the board of education.

Chris George, director of New Haven’s Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) group, wrote in favor of that recommendation, stating that the “relevant criteria should be what people can contribute to the city where they live, work, pay taxes, and raise their families, not whether they can vote.”

However, “on the advice of legal counsel,” the New Haven Board of Alders dropped the effort to allow this proposal to become part of the charter revision commission’s final recommendations.  This created a “tumultuous” meeting of the Board of Alders where resident supporters of the recommendation filled the chamber with chants of “no justice” and displayed large posters of “local immigrants” with blackened mouths and eyes, signifying a lack of voice and recognition.

The proposal was abandoned after it was revealed that state law does not allow non-voters to serve on local boards and commissions, which in turn means that city governments cannot authorize the opposite.

Not only were supporters of this recommendation leapfrogging state law, but they were also leapfrogging rights that many born and bred Americans do not have, the right to serve on the board of education.  Teachers, born, bred, and voting Americans, by state law, are forbidden to serve on the board of education in the district where they are employed.

While laws passed by the state legislature are often done so using as few brain cells as necessary, it is there where folks wishing to allow deserving and diverse members of a community to share their voice and perspective on local boards and commissions take their voice…and posters.  However, non-Americans hollering and screaming for rights legal Americans do not have is as much of an injustice as they themselves are claiming.

Let’s not be exclusionary when we demand inclusiveness.