Newark teacher union’s chief backs groundbreaking reform

By Tom Moran/ The Star-Ledger

Joe Del Grosso is 65 years old now, slowed by Crohn’s disease, with a ring of thick silver hair circling a bald top.

He remembers his militant days as young man, when he began the climb that landed him at the top of the teachers union in Newark.

“I was in jail for three months,” he says.

His crime was joining a strike in 1970. But he was never caught for shooting out the car windows of the school board president, something he did over and over to vent his rage.

“I saw him later at a bar,” Del Grosso says. “And I said, ‘You’re the son of a bitch who sent me to jail.’ And he said, ‘You’re the son of a bitch who blew my windows out.’ So we decided to have a drink, us two sons of bitches. And we became friends.”

History may be repeating itself. Because after decades of battling one superintendent after another, Del Grosso last week smoked a peace pipe with Superintendent Cami Anderson by signing a groundbreaking contract that could unleash a tidal wave of reform in the city.

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