SnapGlow.TV: Modern Gems Galore! 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.
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