Dwayne Ming, founder and former executive director of We Overcome, said that the firm's two contracts had been terminated without due process.

"There should have been an investigation and a hearing," Ming angrily told the School Reform Commission. He said his organization had been a victim of "bad publicity and bad press."

The Daily News reported April 16 that We Overcome had not paid some of its school-support workers for weeks at a time when it was promoting plans to open a day-care center and a family restaurant.

Ming told the SRC yesterday that the employees' allegations that they had not been paid were untrue.

But SRC Chairwoman Sandra Dungee Glenn advised Ming that yesterday's meeting was not the venue for his complaints.

When Ming loudly pressed his case, Glenn urged: "For your own behalf, please do not continue to talk about this in public. You are well-aware that this was not the result of any one article or any one incident."

The district last Friday severed its ties to We Overcome and with Security Universal, an East Germantown-based firm with $456,000 in contracts to help provide security in the schools.

Workers from the two firms had been assigned to about 24 city schools. The two firms were among eight community-based organizations (CBOs) hired to provide "safety-support" workers in hallways and lunchrooms.

Ming, 45, of Laurel Springs, Camden County, was listed on the printed speakers' list for yesterday's SRC meeting to discuss "equity in public schools."

Before complaining about the terminated contracts, Ming told the commission that schools in predominantly African-American neighborhoods in the city were not getting experienced teachers or proper funding.

Glenn responded that the district was aware of those issues and was working to resolve them.

Meanwhile, another listed speaker, Ina Johnson, a former We Overcome employee, complained that she and other colleagues are worried about their final paychecks.

A district official said that all workers who have criminal-background clearances would be paid to work until the school year ends in June.

But Johnson, who had worked at Furness High School in South Philadelphia until last Friday, said that the district told her it does not have her criminal-background clearance on file.

She said that a number of her co-workers had paid about $120 each for criminal-background checks and child-abuse clearances.

"I don't know who to believe," Johnson said in an interview. She said she and her co-workers are still owed about three weeks' pay, but don't know how they will get paid now that Ming has lost his contracts.

"We don't break up fights for nothing," she said. *