Cynthia Nixon outside PS 75 on Friday.

By Carol Tannenhauser

Cynthia Nixon smiled, joked with kids and shook hands outside the entrance to P.S. 75 on West 95th Street during dropoff on Friday morning, while parents gathered around and snapped photos.

“That lady’s running for governor of New York,” a father told his wide-eyed daughter — “and she’s a movie star!”

For Nixon, who is running for governor, it was more of a homecoming than a campaign stop. She may have made her name as an actress, but Nixon became an activist and political leader at schools like this one, fighting for Upper West Side kids.

“I lived in the neighborhood until I was seven,” she recalled. “I went here for kindergarten, first grade and part of second.”

Nixon and Robert Jackson, a Democrat who is running for state Senate.

“My activism began with a battle at the school my daughter was attending,” Nixon continued. “I started fighting the city education cuts, but very soon I was fighting for a statewide solution. Governor Pataki and Governor Cuomo have given the first and second biggest cuts to education we’ve ever had, and $4.2 billion is still owed the city from a lawsuit, which Governor Cuomo refuses to acknowledge.”

Nixon’s daughter, Samantha, started kindergarten on September 10, 2001, at P.S. 163, on West 97th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. The school was overcrowded and underfunded, according to Mia Galison, whose daughter, Elodie, was in Samantha’s class.

“Cynthia could have had her kid in any private school that she wanted to and she opted to have her at P.S.163, with no nurse, no art, no library, no playground,” Galison chuckled, ruefully, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “I think, at that time, they had added a fifth grade to 163, so they bumped the kindergartners out to two trailers in the backyard. There was a gate, but no lock or guard; anyone could walk in off the street. The second day of kindergarten was 9/11, so that added to our general sense of insecurity. There was one teacher and a some-time aide for more than 30 five-and-six- year-old children.”

“Cynthia changed my thinking about activism,” Galison continued. “A lot of us were thinking about day-to-day stuff, like how to get a guard or move the kids from one place to another. She was becoming focused on macro issues, like inequality in the public school funding system. She was definitely the premier person who took action on that front.”

In May, 2002, Nixon, with a group of other parents, blockaded City Hall to protest threatened cuts to the city’s education budget — an action that led to her highly publicized arrest for disorderly conduct. People magazine reported at the time that “the protest [was] over Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to slice $350 million out of the Board of Education’s budget [that] year. After witnessing firsthand the results of financial cuts at her daughter’s school, said Newsday, Nixon began working with a statewide organization called the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE).” At the time, the New York director of AQE and organizer of the protest was Christine Marinoni, who would later become Nixon’s wife. Nixon’s path from that battle to the governor’s race is detailed in this Village Voice story.

The primary for governor and other races is on Thursday, Sept 13.