Jews take over East Ramapo School District and Defund It

The BBQ Pit
1

Preface: In East Ramapo New York for many years Orthodox Jewish population had been increasing as a percentage of the local population (including many Hasidim), the vast majority of these Jews did not want to send their kids to public schools. However, they had no interest in local politics and did not participate in school board elections. They could have, and could have put members on the board, but agreed not to in a back room local politics deal in which the local school board agreed not to scrutinize the Yeshivas and the local Orthodox community agreed not to take over the school board.

This truce held for awhile, but eventually the issue of special education students came up. Under State law, those students have to be served in the public schools, and while there are some provisions for giving tuition benefits to their parents so that they can go to private schools, it’s my understanding the Yeshivas simply would never qualify under the program for various reasons. The local Jewish population wanted the school board to let them get the tuition benefits and send their special education kids to the Yeshivas and turn a blind eye to it. The local school board was not willing to openly violate State law, so declined to do this–and the truce ended.

Immediately, the Orthodox Jewish community was mobilized significantly. These are local school board elections, so turnout is typically low. Previous winners might win 2000 votes to 1000 votes or something. When Orthodox Jewish candidates began appearing on the ballot the Jewish community was bringing 5,000-6,000 people to the polls. They quickly take over the school board, and at first this was partially due to just being far more mobilized, but as the years wore on I believe the Orthodox Jews actually came to constitute a majority of the local population (so even if the non-Jews were as mobilized, they couldn’t win elections.)

The Orthodox Jews on the school board then did the following things:

  1. They closed some public schools and sold the buildings to Yeshivas at below market rates. [These sales were indeed scrutinized and challenged, and ultimately the State required something closer to market rate be charged for those sales.]

  2. They “cut funding” to the bone, most extracurricular programs at all East Ramapo Schools disappeared, things like music education disappeared etc. [This is the terminology TAL and most articles use, but I should point out that because of fucked up teacher’s unions and pension benefits, the East Ramapo School District actually increased its spending under the Jewish board by 33%, it didn’t actually decrease spending at all. It also increased property taxes by 9%. But the argument is that due to ballooning pension costs you “had” to increase spending by 50% or more just to keep up with costs, so a 33% increase still sees a massive cut to school services even if not to the budget.]

  3. They fired the school district’s lawyer, a graduate of the district who while he wasn’t working pro bono he was doing the school district’s work on the cheap. They hired a “hot shot” New York City lawyer who charges something like $900k/year, and he had previously successfully blocked State actions to intervene in Yeshivas educating special education students. This represents a major increase in spending specifically to protect Jewish private schools using school board money.

Link to a long article about it.

TAL 530: A Not-So-Simple Majority link to an episode dealing with this.

There was a thread created for this in Cafe Society, but frankly I didn’t see any entertainment/media base reason for it to be there and didn’t view it as a fertile ground for discussion.

My hope is people have some strong opinions on this, I definitely do not like what the Jews have done in East Ramapo, but I also didn’t have the incensed fury most people I’ve spoken with about this appear to have over this topic.

I think it is worth mentioning that the district outside of the Jewish population (so the actual families sending their kids to public schools) is overwhelmingly poor, black and Hispanic. These are not middle class white families mad that Jews have overran their local school district–I don’t think that should make a difference in how one reads the story, but I know that it will (especially here), so I thought it should be mentioned.

2

This shouldn’t be described as “Jews take over” the school district – “Jews” followed by phrases like “take over” or “control” and the like are strongly associated with conspiracy theories about Jews conspiring to direct world events.

So it wasn’t “Jews take over school district” – it was “East Ramapo Orthodox community takes over school district”.

So on to the issue – it sucks. Bad on the Orthodox guys who took it over. Nasty politics, largely driven by religious fundamentalism.

3

So? Jews did take over the school district. You’re being wishy-washy for no reason.

4

I listened to the TAL episode and had the same reaction you did, I don’t like it but no fury. I completely understand why the Yeshivas took the action they did, but it is still pretty lame. In the school district over 66% of the students go to private schools so is it really any wonder that these majority parents want to defund the public schools and divert resources to their private schools? Really, I believe it is up to the county/state to fix this problem though none of the solutions I see are perfect.

5

Yeah, this is precisely my opinion. I expect people to respond in predictable ways, and Jewish or religious or not, it’s a predictable response when State law allows local school districts to behave in this way. I’m actually already familiar with similar situations (but not involving private schools per se) with states that allow for small school districts that have lots of power.

In States I’m familiar with, that allow for small school districts, you will see developers lay down basically from scratch a new town. All the houses are in the high dollar range, so when people move in and start incorporating the town there is no low income population. They then build a really good school district funded by their property taxes. However, often times schools in the same county in poor cities become ghettoized hell holes because there are no higher income taxpayers or high property value owners to contribute. I’ve talked about this before, and a response frequently is “Well, if one community wants to build better schools, why is that wrong?”

My feeling is that public schools are supposed to be a sort of equalizer, rich people shouldn’t be able to flee from a school system with poor kids and set one up literally right next door in the same county.

The States that get this issue right in my opinion are the ones where State funding is the larger share of school funds and where the smallest district that can exist by law are county school districts (coterminous with counties, obviously.) Further, the ones who really get it right have equalization protocols. So for example if County A is spending more than 10% per pupil above what the State average is, then it receives less State funds and more State funds go to other counties. What this does is take State tax revenue from that county and spreads them to the other counties. Which may seem unfair, but what it’s actually doing is forcing higher income counties to help the entire State out. A final pillar in doing well in this regard is a powerful State Schools Superintendent and State Board of Education, who are ready/willing to go in and take over school boards that are trying to freeload or destroy local education.

But absent all these, I expect people to work and behave to their benefit, and that’s all the Jews on East Ramapo School District’s board are doing. One thing TAL pointed out that should have gotten more attention: these Orthodox Jewish board members were elected basically to keep property taxes down and to make sure Yeshivas got special education tuition funding for special ed students (in contravention to State law.) They are doing what they were elected to do.

6

Does a school board, as a whole, have an legal obligation to provide for all the children in their district equally?

7

I think they usually have a vague obligation under State laws (I know nothing about New York in this regard), which is why you see State governments taking over local school districts from time to time, when things have gotten so bad it allows the State authorities (typically a Governor or State Schools Superintendent) to step in.

8

Words and phrases sometimes have implications beyond their literal meaning. I’m just suggesting that people shouldn’t use the phrase “Jews take over”, or similar phrases, because of the implications of how that has been used. The way that phrase has been used historically is to implicate all Jews for various transgressions.

9

ISTM the crux of the issue isn’t the Hasidim vs. the rest of Ramapo, it’s the citizens of Ramapo (who include the Hasidim) vs. the traditional educational system.

The locals had figured out a situation that was satisfactory to both sides, but a state law ruined their deal. And the budget cuts were a direct result of unsustainable pensions negotiated by the (old) school board and the teachers unions. The ethnic change of the community just accelerrated and worsened cuts that were going to happen anyway.

I also note that the tone of the stories covering this is very, very different from the tone of stories covering other communities facing demographic change; the concerns of some communities about hispanics moving in and reshaping the community to their benefit are usually dismissed as sheer racism. When the new immigrants are Hasidim, the concerns are treated a lot more sympathetically.

10

That’s kind of an odd way to describe it. istm they had a deal on other aspects and when the Orthodox group wanted to violate a State law the school board balked. That’s hardly a “State law ruined their deal”.

11

Exactly. I’m a Jew, and I’d be thankful if the OP didn’t associate me with those fucking dossim.

12

There’s nothing incorrect about the thread title. They are Jews, they took over a local school district, largely due to factors relating to their brand of the religion. It isn’t coincidental they just happen to all be Jewish, it was done specifically for reasons related to their Judaism and further was done as a group.

Just because not all Jews are the same is immaterial, the same as it doesn’t make it wrong to title a thread “white cop shoots black teenager”, other whites may be uncomfortable with what another white guy did–but that doesn’t change that he’s a white guy. It doesn’t imply broader guilt-by-association, either, though. Something people should realize.

13

No, that’s not really an accurate way to look at it. By and large the non Orthodox population are lower income and support public schools because they couldn’t afford to send their kids to private schools anyway. It’s one group of citizens against another, it’s simply not accurate to describe it as a broad group against the traditional education system and that group just happening to include Hasidic Jews.

I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the other property owners without children don’t particularly mind the downward pressure on property taxes, though.

Actually the pension stuff wasn’t negotiated by the old school board, while most of the management of the school district is up to the school board, apparently the pensions and such were set by State law. So their hands were always bound on that one. Even the current school board is bound by those laws, so while they have increased funding to continue those obligations they have cut funding from current services.

Further, it’s not really true that State law ruined their deal. That’s only a part of it, the Orthodox Jews have been very open about the fact that while they were upset about the special education thing the fact that their community had grown to be a majority in the district meant it was essentially time to take over anyway. They actually tried to negotiate again on this matter and the Orthodox leaders basically said “why would we negotiate, we have all the cards and you have nothing to gives us in return.”

It is interesting, but I think it’s also easy to explain. Most communities that freak out about Hispanic or black migration either don’t become majority of either of those demographics (and thus the locals are just overreacting to their lily white communities becoming slightly less white), or you legitimately have a large influx of those minorities and all the whites just up and leave. In this case the “original” residents are low income blacks and Hispanics, and they can’t easily avail themselves of the “white flight” option.

Further, blacks and Hispanics as groups are notoriously uninvolved in local politics. The reason Ferguson, MO is majority black but has a white city council is because of extremely low voter participation by the black community. There aren’t a lot of similar situations with blacks and Hispanics, this is kind of a unique situation with the ethnic/religious thing thrown in.

There are certainly similar situations where wealthy residents manipulate school boards and district borders to their advantage (as I explained above.)

14

I think the school board has a legal obligation to provide for all children in the public schools equally. If there are families that home school or send their kids to a prep school or other private institution, the school board has no obligation beyond making sure they meet a certain minimum requirement. They certainly do not have a legal obligation to ensure that students at the public schools are treated equally to those at Phillip Exeter Academy if it is in the district, nor do they have the obligation to throttle the private institutions to bring them down to the mean.

So the parents in this district felt that the rising property taxes for the purpose of education were not benefiting them in any way, especially since the state would not allow them to get support for special needs kids and required that they go to the non-religious public schools which is unacceptable to these orthodox parents. This coupled with the fact that the percentage of students in the district that is orthodox has been continuously rising and now is a very solid majority makes it easy to see how this can happen. They are potentially paying for the majority of the public education and getting 0 benefit.

15

Do you not recognize the history of phrases like “Jews take over”? We’ve already recognized that you used a literally correct grammatical statement, but there is more to human language then literal correctness.

“White cop shoots…” doesn’t imply collective guilt, but “whites shoot black teenagers” would.

16

Perhaps we can compromise and say “local Jews” take over school district.

17

The Hasidim in this case have every intention of running the school for the traditional students into the ground and then buying the schools at a discount due to fraudulent appraisals that they ordered, and then use the schools as Yeshivas for their own kids. These parents aren’t all in this together against the state. The percentage of Hasidim sending their kids to these public schools is roughly 0%.

18

Sounds good.

19

Previous discussion: This American Life 534: "A Not-So-Simple Majority" - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board

20

I think the OP and the TAL episode are connecting three completely separate issues. The first is the balance between majority rule and minority rights. This issue alone doesn’t inspire much ire in me. Ultimately, I am not sure you can complain too much just because you lost an election even if you think the elected members are being unfair.

Second is whether insular communities should have flexibility in terms of how tax money is collected and whether certain accommodations can be given. I think society has come down on both sides of this issue. Indian reservations are given pretty broad autonomy for a variety of reasons, as are many religious communities.

The third, more important issue, is the back-dealing and misappropriation of public funds. The latter issue is less sexy, but is FAR more problematic in my mind. No school board has a right to sell public property at below markets rates, period. That crime is compounded by the fact that these sales were to entities with whom the board members had relationships. That, if it can be proven, is a crime. Hiring a more expensive lawyer is also suspect. To me, this should be the discussion. The “backward religious sect gives local minority community taste of its own medicine angle” is a better story, but it obscures the real crime here.

Oddly enough, when I was listening to TAL, I was wondering why these people didn’t just move their election to a Saturday. Much easier way to skew the election results when these people won’t even turn on appliances on the Sabbath.