HEADLINE: Controversy Over, Enclave Joins
School Board Group
BYLINE: By TAMAR
LEWIN
BODY: For years, Kiryas Joel, an enclave of Hasidic Jews in Orange County, N.Y.,
fought in court to create a public school district for its disabled children.
And for years, its leading opponent was the New York State Association of School
Boards, which argued that such a district would violate the constitutional
separation of church and state.
The litigation bounced
from state court to the United States Supreme Court and back for 12 years, and
ended last year, when a state court upheld the Legislature's fourth law devised
to allow such a district.
Now, the adversarial
relationship is over, too: early this year, Kiryas Joel joined
the School Boards Association.
"It was a matter of
principle that we had to pursue," said David Ernst, a spokesman for the
association, "and now that it's resolved, we're very happy to have them as
members."
Kiryas Joel school
officials also played down any bad feelings.
"I don't
think you drive by looking through the rearview mirror," said Steven Benardo,
superintendent of the Kiryas Joel Union Free School District.
"That was then, this is now. And actually, we'd wanted to join before, but the
association said it would be inappropriate while we were litigating."
The village of Kiryas Joel, 45 miles
north of New York City, was incorporated in 1977 as an offshoot of the Satmar
Hasidic community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The
residents are mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews who wear distinctive clothes and send
their children to private yeshivas.
But the village
sought a public school -- and the state aid that would bring -- for its disabled
children, whose education is particularly expensive. Residents said they would
not send disabled children to the surrounding Monroe-Woodbury Central District
because they would be taunted for their religious dress.
The Kiryas Joel school district has about 100
full-time and 100 part-time students.
The Legislature,
with the cooperation first of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and then of Gov. George E.
Pataki, passed four laws in response to lobbying from the politically
influential Satmar sect, enabling the creation of Kiryas Joel,
and the district opened in 1990.
The first law, written
for Kiryas Joel by name, was found by state and federal courts
and eventually the United States Supreme Court to be unconstitutional because it
constituted a special favor to a religious group.
Two
subsequent laws allowed any municipality in the state that met specific criteria
of population and income to carve out its own school district, but the courts
found that those laws also were written so narrowly as to favor Kiryas Joel.
The Legislature's fourth
attempt at writing the law, in 1999, was upheld by a state judge. The law gives
any municipality that has 10,000 to 125,000 residents and is contained within a
larger school district the right to petition for its own separate school
district, financed by state education aid. The law's terms are broad enough to
cover more than two dozen municipalities.
The School
Boards Association did not appeal the state judge's decision.
"This time they got it right," Mr. Ernst said.
http://www.nytimes.com
GRAPHIC: Photo: Linda Dolansky, a physical therapist, helps an
8-year-old student at the Kiryas Joel Union Free School.
(Chris Ramirez for The New York Times)
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