Thomas Breen photo
East Rock Record’s Isabel Faustino grills Pendragon.
Mayoral candidate Urn Pendragon has personal experience getting bullied: as a nerdy student, as a transgender woman, as someone who has struggled through homelessness and unemployment.
Pendragon told two middle school reporters she considers that experience not a liability, but an asset in her bid to represent the city’s “underrepresented.”
On Thursday afternoon, the 50-year-old affordable housing activist visited the library of East Rock Community Magnet School on Nash Street for a half-hour on the record interview with Isabel Faustino and Dave Cruz, the two political reporters for the school’s East Rock Record student newspaper.
The students reporters have already interviewed incumbent Mayor Toni Harp, as well as the two other challengers vying for the Democratic Party nomination, Justin Elicker and Wendy Hamilton. Pendragon and the latter two have filed papers to seek a spot on the Democratic mayoral ballot.
In a wide-ranging conversation about affordable housing, renewable energy, tax-exempt nonprofits, and public pension reform, the two pre-teen reporters asked Pendragon how she would address a problem a bit closer to home, or, rather, a bit closer to school.
Urn Pendragon with Faustino, East Rock Record student reporter Dave Cruz, and graduate coordinator Hector Peralta.
“What can you do about the bullying that’s been happening a lot around this school and other places?” asked Faustino, an 11-year-old sixth-grader at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) who said she transferred from East Rock School to ESUMS in part because she was bullied at her old school for being a “teacher’s pet.”
“Most of my life I’ve been the victim of discrimination and bullying,” Pendragon said. “So I know how important this is.”
As a kid, Pendragon said, she was “a bit of a geek.” When she was just 12 years old, she got into a fistfight with an older student on the football team who picked on her incessantly. In another school fight, she said, a student charged her with a baseball bat and hit her in the arm.
Pendragon promised if elected to work with students, parents, teachers, and principals to recommend to the Board of Education the best way forward for minimizing bullying in New Haven Public Schools.
Pendragon.
“I think it’s important that we have some kind of school training,” she said. “Classroom training by the teachers that’s ok’d by the Board of Education to bring awareness.”
She said she would like to see videos shown in class depicting what bullying looks like. She’d even like to see classroom exercises that require kids to role play with each other, acting out bullying situations so that each students knows exactly how hurtful and debilitating bullying can be.
Faustino asked Pendragon what motivated to run for mayor in the first place.
For one, Pendragon responded, the 2016 presidential election that put Donald Trump in office.
“Let’s just say the LGBTQ+ community has been attacked,” she said. “That was one thing that made me want to run.”
But the more immediate catalyst was attending a Board of Alders public hearing on Yale’s multi-year commitment to boost its local hiring. At that hearing, local labor advocates criticized the university for not doing enough to hire locally, especially from neighborhoods of need like Dixwell, the Hill, and Fair Haven.
Peralta and Cruz.
“It was after seeing people who were being discriminated against for how little they make,” she said, “for who they are, where they come from, where they live, that discrimination just finally threw me over the edge and that was the reason why I decided to run.
“Because I don’t think that any of the other mayoral candidates know what it is truly like to be discriminated against based on hatred and intolerance. Being a transgender woman, I’ve experienced that first hand. That’s what made me want to run.”
Faustino asked Pendragon why she considers that life experience on the margins of society an advantage in this campaign.
“How can you really represent someone if you’ve never experienced what they’ve been through?” Pendragon responded. “If you’ve never been homeless? If you’ve never struggled to get enough money to live on, to pay rent? If you’ve never been hungry before? If you’ve never been punched because someone doesn’t like you.”
She said that experience would make her administration more attuned to the “underrepresented”: the poor and working class, immigrants, religious minorities.
The Pendragon campaign’s new business card.
Faustino and Cruz, a 13-year-old seventh-grader and the student body president at East Rock School, praised Pendragon for opening up about her life experience with the student reporters. They praised her as well for offering specific policy proposals on how to combat bullying in the schools as well as on how to increase the city’s affordable housing offerings through an inclusionary zoning ordinance paired with city advocacy for solar farms and wind turbines.
“I think you’re one of the only candidates who have actual plans,” Cruz said.
Faustino agreed: “She wants to change these things based on her actual experience.”
Pendragon, who said she has spent $25 on her campaign so far, left the students with her card.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the students reporters’ full interview with Pendragon.