Alleged pool racism unsettled camp leader

Toughened by eight years in the Army Reserve and inspired by a devotion to religion, Alethea Wright - a survivor of childhood abuse - believed she could handle just about anything life threw at her.

Then came the day she crossed the border between city and suburbs with children in her day camp and took them to the pool at the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley.

After a June 29 summer outing that is now known worldwide, Wright's camp children were disinvited from the well-to-do, private club, where they had paid nearly $2,000 to swim on seven Mondays.

"This situation is very, very personal for me," Wright, 42, executive director of Creative Steps Inc., said in a sometimes tearful interview this week. "I was mistreated as a child. I don't like to see children mistreated at all."

Wright, the children's parents, and others familiar with the event have alleged that the club was engaging in racism when it asked 25 African American and 25 Latino children not to return.

Anguished and incensed, Wright, a muscular woman with light-brown cornrows and large, expressive eyes, plans to sue the club.

Carolyn Nichols, an attorney for Creative Steps, said yesterday that no papers had been filed. And efforts are under way to bring about a settlement. Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.), who has met with club officials and Wright separately, has said he believes the matter could best be dealt with through mediation by the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.

The club, which has since re-invited the children to swim, did not return calls and e-mails requesting comment.

"Something needs to be done," said Wright, who spoke for more than an hour outside Laura H. Carnell Elementary School in Oxford Circle. The camp, part of the day-care center run by Wright, is housed in the school.

"This is a moral situation. This is about racism. This is about culture. This is about a breakdown in community."

Wright started Creative Steps in 1998 to serve special-needs children. She expanded it into a state-licensed day-care facility with summer-camp programs, employing between 14 and 17 staff members. The nonprofit's 2007 federal tax filing listed her pay at $50,573.

Other records show that Creative Steps owes $79,094 in federal taxes. Additional state liens relate to unpaid taxes and unemployment insurance amounting to $31,426, Common Pleas Court documents show.

"I had an accountant who did not do the proper filings," Wright said. "We're meeting with the different agencies."

A single mother of four - including 22-year-old Antonio, a minister at Mount Airy Church of God in Christ - Wright graduated from Temple University in 1999 with a degree in women's studies and is working on a master's degree in special education from Arcadia University.

Born in West Oak Lane, she is a graduate of Martin Luther King High School. To help pay for her education, Wright said, she joined the Army Reserve in 1989 and had made supply sergeant by the time she left in 1997.

Her troubled past sparked her interest in children with special emotional, social, and physical needs, she said.

Wright has tried to expose children in her charge to "a better life out there than what she saw in her environment growing up," said Wright's aunt, Yerly Washington, a special-education teacher in Charlotte, N.C., who calls herself "the closest thing she has to a parent."

Wright's day-care center and camp run on tuition and state and federal funding. In 2007, the public funding totaled $130,000, records show.

Ironically, Wright said, she lives in the Huntingdon Valley area and is a neighbor of many of the people who apparently rejected her camp children.

Wright's youngest, 11-year-old Marcus, attends one of the two Rydal Elementary Schools in the Abington Schools District and is, she said, one of several African American children in the sixth grade.

"My son was there from the second to the sixth grades," Wright said. "He N-E-V-E-R experienced racism."

She said Marcus was part of a school trip to the Valley Club on June 17. He swam without incident among more than 50 children, most of them white, she said.

This is significant, Wright added, because the Valley Club has said the 55 Creative Steps children had been disinvited because their group was too large.

Calls to Abington school officials were not returned.

In years past, Wright took campers swimming at the New Frankford Community Y, about a five-minute drive from the Carnell School on Devereaux Avenue. "The kids were well-behaved, well-supervised," said Terry Tobin, who directed New Frankford. "She was good, very concerned with the kids."

When the center closed last month because of lack of money, Wright found herself without a pool two weeks before camp was to start.

The children typically swam three days a week. Wright got swimming times for two days at the Jewish Community Center Klein Branch on Jamison Avenue, but she needed a pool on Mondays.

So, she said, she began searching online for a replacement and saw the Valley Club's Web site.

She began e-mailing club president John Duesler and worked out a schedule for the camp's visits: 3:30 to 5 p.m. Mondays from June 29 through Aug. 10.

"He said he thought it was a great idea," Wright said. She collected the $30-per-child membership fee from the campers' families and mailed Duesler a check for $1,950. (The camp has 65 children, all of whose families paid.)

Duesler did not respond to requests for comment.

When the campers arrived June 29, Wright said, Duesler came onto the bus and addressed the children.

"He said, 'Hey, kids, are you ready to swim?' " she said, adding that she sensed no change in Duesler's attitude when he saw the campers' racial makeup.

The 55 campers in attendance that day lined up on the grass outside the pool and were divided into swimmers and nonswimmers. Wright went with the nonswimmers, some wearing life vests, to the shallow end of the pool.

A few campers went up one of the hills overlooking the pool, probably to visit the snack stand, Wright said. About a half-hour into their swim time, she said, she saw four of those campers running down the hill toward her, upset and shouting, "Miss Wright! Miss Wright!"

They told her they had heard members making comments including "What are all these black kids doing here?" and "What are these black people going to do to my kids?"

Wright confronted the members, directing her comments to a woman whom her campers said they had recognized as a staff member at the Carnell School.

Wright said she had heard the woman say, "The children are thieves."

Duesler stepped in before things escalated. Wright said he was apologetic.

"He said, 'I'm so embarrassed. The kids are great,' " Wright said.

She walked back down to the pool, where, she said, she saw parents hurriedly pulling their children out.

Wright demonstrated the tugging gesture. "That," she added, "is teaching racism."

When the Creative Steps children arrived at the pool, about 24 people were in it, Wright said. After the parents yanked out their children, she added, "only three people remained."

Still, no one left the pool area, Wright said. Instead, many of the parents stood by their dripping children, their arms crossed in a defiant pose.

Two members took a stand, Wright said. "This is a shame," she said one woman had told her. "All these kids want to do is swim."

Two days later, on July 1, Duesler - still apologetic, Wright said - called to tell her that the board and membership had voted to rescind the campers' membership.

On July 2, Duesler told her he had called an emergency meeting to reconsider the campers' membership, she said. He telephoned Wright after the meeting to say the board and membership "are not budging," she said, but would not say why.

She said he had told her: "The members and the board decided, 'Let the chips fall where they may.' "

The club refunded the campers' membership fee July 3. Wright said she had not communicated with Duesler since that final call, except for a text message she received July 13, asking her to call him. She said she did not respond.

Meanwhile, the children swim two days a week in the pool at the Jewish Community Center.

"There's not a single problem with her or the kids," center director Andre Krug said. "No one made remarks about black kids here."

As a day-care center, Creative Steps has never had a major incident or violation, said a representative of the state Department of Public Welfare.

Trying to make sense of what happened, Wright said her son Marcus, who had swum in the pool with his school June 17, had also accompanied her group to the club on June 29.

On two different days, he witnessed two very different reactions.

Wright has a question:

"Do you know how baffling this is to him?"