An ambitious guy who wants to get elected? Someone who thinks private school kids deserve an education too? The likelihood that there would be zero people of this sort is low.
Someone who thinks private school kids “deserve an education too” (whatever that means - they’re not publicly funded) is not going to prioritize them over public schools.
The are trying to move toward a ward system, which seems (to me) like a way of gerrymandering the voting, as the Hasidic Jews tend to live in dense, clustered areas.
But, like everything else, this vote is now ending up in litigation. This situation is probably going to work itself out in the courts. We’re not just talking about an issue of democracy, but one of illegality.
In recent months, the state appointed a fiscal monitor to oversee the school board due to what is going on. The bribed appraiser got a plea deal to a misdemeanor when he was indicted on several felony charges with some pretty damning evidence, and so far the Attorney General so far could not comment on whether that indicated that he was cooperating. And the school district recently turned down 3.5 million dollars from the state because it included oversight into how that money is spent by the board (oversight being an advisory committee consisting of “a parent, a teacher, a school board member, the superintendent and another administrator” which seems very reasonable), which has outraged the public school community.
This American Life shed a spotlight on it, but I think if this group had simply been screwing over their constituents legally and democratically, they could have continued for a long time, but the because it appears very likely that there were laws broken that the state isn’t ignoring it anymore.
I just listened to the TAL podcast and I would defend the takeover had this thread been in GD and I saw it at the time. It seems like a combination of over spending at districts with rich pensions, generous union contracts, and worsening economies led most districts in the area to raise property taxes. This district cut costs instead.
There is a lot to criticize - be it the under market sales, the executive sessions of the board, and the uncivil behavior. But underlying all of that, the takeover of the school board, the exertion of the will of the majority to put a halt to the rising taxes, the main point of the takeover, that’s local control in action. If the majority of the population want low tax low service while meeting minimum requirements, they should be able to do that.
Maybe the goyim could start flying Palestinian flags. 
I’ll join in this. What’s going on in the East Ramapo school district has nothing to do with Jews in general, and everything to do with Hasidim (and not all Hasidim – not every Hasidic sect is involved in this brouhaha), who are a small minority of Jews.
That said, Hasidic groups do have a way of finding themselves at odds with neighboring communities.
We have a bit of an issue brewing in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I live very close to a lovely, brand-new park with lots of facilities for children, and I like to take my daughter to the playgrounds there. Especially the water park, with lots of sprinklers and running-water things and a wading pool. My twenty-month old daughter is strangely fascinated by running water, so she loves this place.
On Sundays, many, many Hasidim come to the park. And they are welcome. But, at the water park, there’s a problem. They dress their daughters in head-to-toe bathing suits, and look askance at girls dressed less “modestly.” They’ll arrive at the water park early, and essentially block access to anyone other than Hasidic families, so as to protect their sons from being corrupted by a glance of a two-year-old girl in a bathing suit.
It’s getting really annoying. And it’s the same mentality at work in the East Ramapo school district.
… and the bribery and corruption. We can criticize those too, right?
It’s been a while since I listened to the podcast, but I remember them addressing this somewhat. The reporters conceded that times were tough for lots of school districts in the area, but it seems that the cuts to the East Ramapo school district went well beyond what neighboring districts had to do to get by.
Wasn’t the whole point that this wasn’t the will of the majority? But rather an extremely well organized minority voting itself into power and exerting its will over the majority?
Oh for sure, that’s bad. Though the only thing mentioned in the podcast was the below market sale. From reading this thread, I can see there were shenanigans with the appraiser as well. I’m sure there were efforts on multiple fronts to skirt the rules and outright violate them as well.
But what the podcast seemed to criticize the most, the takeover of the school board, the hard line anti-negotiation stances, the budget cuts - all of those things that garnered negative reaction in this thread and in the CS thread that was linked - all of that seems fine to me. If the people of Ferguson rallied together to change the city council, appoint new police oversight, change the rules of engagement, lower taxes, shift focus away from fine enforcement, I think we’d applaud that as working within the system to enact change. That’s what I see this community doing. Minus the other bad stuff.
That’s what they said on the podcast, but I wasn’t convinced by their conclusion. Post #30 has the transcript quote. Essentially pension costs, heath care costs, union contracts, and cost of living type increases were happening at the time. In response, the surrounding districts chose to raise property taxes ( > 25%) to offset these things. This district didn’t raise taxes as much (9%), they decided to make steeper cuts. By raising taxes other districts were able to grow their budget by an average of 50%. This district grew their budget by 33% - and the cuts illustrated on the podcast were because even with that growth, the budget was consumed by pensions, rising healthcare costs, and the impact of union contracts.
This decision making is what the board was elected to do. The people that agreed to the expensive pensions, healthcare, and union contracts assuming these would all be paid for by rising property taxes made a mistake.
Unless the voting was rigged, it was the will of the majority. The entire idea behind the podcast was that the majority was able to enact things because they had such a majority position. Low tax, low service is not a model of government that everyone likes, but it should be one that is available if the voters choose it.
Not sure you care, but the general concept you are pushing is Tiebout sorting: folks sort themselves into the local district with their preferred mix of taxes and services. In the real world this doesn’t occur without imperfections, but yeah it’s a thing.
Ressurrected and still not renamed? The combination of using Jews to mean “some Jewish people” and it being a negative thing sure makes it look like the OP is blaming them on being Jewish.
No, not if that same majority voted for all that other stuff. Not if the majority were unhappy with the decision.
Just because the majority votes you in doesn’t make what you do what the majority wants.
Plus, there is a tyranny of the majority, where minorities get shafted because the majority doesn’t care about them. It’s the major flaw in the democratic model.
And then there’s “what do you really want” vs. “how we demand you try to get there.” I’m sure a system that had a 50% surplus and didn’t need cuts was a preferred option to a 33% surplus that was being eaten up.
That’s incredibly pedantic and ridiculous. Some Jews did something bad but because it wasn’t phrased as if carefully walking on eggshells, we must therefore conclude: Hitler.
I’m not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying that if an elected representative body representing the will of the people enact something, a future elected representative body cannot undo what was previously done? Let me know if that’s a fair interpretation of what you’re saying.
True - but in our representative form of government, it is assumed that the elected body represent the aggregated will of the majority. And given the fact that the Hasidic population won multiple elections year after year, and did so while implementing the policies in question, I think it’s a fair assumption that the majority of people voting supported the actions of the elected folks.
This is why we enshrine certain rights - that two wolves and a sheep don’t get to vote on what’s for dinner. Not raising taxes or cutting budgets doesn’t rise to this level.
Again, I can’t determine what you are trying to say here. I would say that the system implemented was the desired system with the desired results, of the majority of people voting.
This is very misleading.
Based on your link, the money wasn’t a grant. It was effectively a loan - it was an “advance” to be deducted from future state funding. The board wasn’t turning down free money out of spite that they would lose control of it. They were turning down a loan that they would have to repay and which would go to purposes that they had no control over - they were being asked to effectively abdicate being the board. It was a reasonable decision.
Can you provide a bit of detail as to how they “essentially block access to anyone other than Hasidic families”?
This seems like a dubious claim and I wonder if there any actual evidence that this is correct?
For starts, over 70% of the kids in the district are private school kids. These people tend to have large families, but I don’t know if they’re large enough to produce that ratio if they were a minority of the voting population.
I suppose it’s possible, I guess. But if they also happen to be consistently winning elections, then I think the notion that they’re winning over the majority by being extremely well organized is a claim that you need to back up.
Everyone likes to claim to be the true silent majority being outflanked by the organizing tactics of the minority.
How is this different than any other local election? Local election turnout is always dodgy at best. I looked up some recent results and we had a 12.54 percent turnout for the last city elections.
Any time you’ve got local issues at hand, an organized minority is going to be able to exert outsized influenced. That’s not because the minority group is cheating - it’s because Americans, for the most part, couldn’t care less about local elections.
However, these particular elections are exceptions to that rule. The local elections in that area and for those posts are very hotly contested, with enormous interest on both sides. It’s not like the supposed minority went under the radar and slipped something past the majority which wasn’t paying attention.
What was the turnout for the election where the Hasidic community took over the board? Genuinely curious.
Would Hasidim or Haredi be the more correct term for these communities? What label do they themselves use?
That’s my memory of a podcast I listened to once, on a highway, many months ago. But that does appear to the case:
[QUOTE=Ira Glass]
And here’s a curious demographic fact about East Ramapo. Most of the people in East Ramapo were not Hasids, but most of the children were. Two out of three children in the school district were Hasidic.
[/QUOTE]
I haven’t gone through the transcript to see if there are any better numbers, but as of the reporting, the Hasid population was the minority.
Here’s the relevant part of the transcript:
[QUOTE=This American Life]
Ben Calhoun
This is Mimi Calhoun. She’s a former East Ramapo school parent, elected to the school board in 2004. She showed me the school board voting results from the last few decades, how things changed around 2007, 2008, when the Hasidim made a move for control of the school system by taking over the school board. I want to just say, when you hear these totals, the numbers are going to maybe sound small. Remember, these are suburban school board elections. People winning with a few thousand or even a few hundred votes-- that’s the norm in any district around here.
Mimi Calhoun
I had about 3,000 votes. My opponent had about 2,000. And those were sort of the numbers we had. A total of maybe 5,000 people voted. The next year when Aron Wieder ran–
Ben Calhoun
Aron Wieder was one of the first Hasidic candidates elected to the board.
Mimi Calhoun
He had 6,000 votes, double what I had. That was astonishing. Our numbers stayed about the same, 2,000 or 3,000, and the Orthodox votes tripled. And then their numbers just started increasing.
Suzanne Young
It was almost scary the way they-- you know, it’s like no matter what we did? Like, if we can bring out 5,000 votes, they could bring out 7,000 votes. It was-- it was almost as if they could calculate how many people we might be able to get to, and they could bring out that many more people.
Ben Calhoun
This is Suzanne Young-Mercer. She’s another former school board member. And like she’s saying, it’s remarkable to look at these elections, to see how the totals start climbing after 2007. It makes me think of that Bugs Bunny cartoon with Elmer Fudd, where they’re racing up in the barber chairs. Vote totals go from 5,000 to 8,000, 13, 16, 18. You can see both sides turn it up-- though the Hasidic-backed candidate’s always a little bit out front.
Lots of people on the public school side talk about this with bitterness and awe. They tell these stories about Hasidic voters dressed in black filing out of buses.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think anyone could say they’re cheating, but it’s unusual. Most people don’t vote in local elections because nobody cares. The claim here is that there was an organized effort to get people to care about a single issue in a very important way. That’s certainly not normal. Perfectly above board, but unusual enough to make national news, apparently.
That’s pretty much exactly what happened.