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Creative Steps rejects offer to return

Amid a storm of racial controversy, a Philadelphia day camp whose children were asked to leave a private suburban swim club have rejected the club's invitation to return and announced plans to sue.

Creative Steps camper Jabriel Brown and his mother, Christine Pembleton, leave a meeting between parents of campers and lawyers at the Carnell Elementary School on Monday. The parents voted not to return to The Valley swim club.  (Yong Kim / Staff Photographer )
Creative Steps camper Jabriel Brown and his mother, Christine Pembleton, leave a meeting between parents of campers and lawyers at the Carnell Elementary School on Monday. The parents voted not to return to The Valley swim club. (Yong Kim / Staff Photographer )Read more

Amid a storm of racial controversy, a Philadelphia day camp whose children were asked to leave a private suburban swim club have rejected the club's invitation to return and announced plans to sue.

"The children are permanently scarred," Alethea Wright, executive director of Creative Steps Inc., said in a news conference yesterday at the camp's headquarters in the Oxford Circle section.

She said that she had not returned a text message from Valley Club President John G. Duesler Jr. asking her to call him, and that the camp and dozens of families of campers will file a federal discrimination suit this month.

Wright, noting that Duesler cited the pool's inability to accommodate the 65 day-campers when he asked them not to return, said she didn't see how the group could go back "unless additional footage is added."

The children, mostly black and Hispanic, will not return despite a near-unanimous Sunday afternoon vote among members of the Valley Club, a 150-family swim club in Huntingdon Valley, to try to make amends.

"We realized it was the right thing to do," Duesler said yesterday in the club's driveway before the day camp's news conference.

Efforts to reach Duesler after the day camp announced its decision not to return were unsuccessful.

Allegations of racism rocked the Valley Club after the children's initial visit to the club's pool June 29.

Club members removed their children from the pool, some while making racial comments, Wright and others have said. Duesler severed contracts the club had signed with Creative Steps and two other day camps for periodic summer visits.

The situation has drawn global publicity, a separate federal discrimination lawsuit, and a civil-rights investigation by the state's Human Relations Commission.

Duesler said club members' actions had been misunderstood, with a decision made for pool safety interpreted as a racist act. "This is the saddest week of my life," Duesler said yesterday. "Everything I stand for and everything this club represents has been turned on its head."

After Duesler was roundly criticized for saying the influx of day-camp swimmers had changed the club's "complexion" - a poor word choice, he later said - the club was picketed repeatedly last week.

Over the weekend, Duesler and other board members opted to reinstate the day camps' contracts. At a hastily called Sunday afternoon general membership meeting, the overwhelming vote was to ask the day campers to return - and to find a way to manage safety concerns related to having dozens of children in the pool at a time, such as using more lifeguards.

"It was nearly unanimous," Duesler said. "There was one 'no' vote."

At the Creative Steps news conference, however, dozens of assembled parents unanimously said they had no interest in sending their children back to the Valley Club.

"I didn't know people hated people so much," said Sherlene Washington, who added that her 8-year-old grandson had been "hurt."

After the invitation to return went out, attorneys for parents of a group of the day-camp students said a discrimination lawsuit filed last week against the club was on hold.

That lawsuit's future, attorney Brian Mildenberg said at his South Broad Street office yesterday, depends on "everybody being pleased." The club has not yet been served with the suit, but Mildenberg said the parents he represents could still move forward with the case.

The new lawsuit is to be filed this month, attorneys said. About 45 families, along with the day camp itself, are to be plaintiffs in the discrimination and breach-of-contract case.

"This has nothing to do with safety," attorney Gabriel Levin said. "It has to do with the color of their skin."

Before a camp trip to a gymnastics event in Huntingdon Valley yesterday, several of the children who made the June 29 trip to Valley Club's pool expressed little desire to return.

"I don't want to go back," Creative Steps camper Jabriel Brown, 12, said yesterday. "I don't want to get treated the same."

Dymir Baylor, 14, who said he heard the racially oriented comments himself during the trip to Valley Club, was similarly inclined.

"I'm afraid if we go back, we'll get put in the same situation," Baylor said.

Other Creative Steps campers said their reception at the Valley Club had been "ignorant and mean," and left them angry about hearing club members question why "black kids" were in the pool.

"That was a rude comment that they made," said Shuron Davis, 11. "I don't want to go through that again."