Copyright 1999 The Hearst Corporation  
The Times Union (Albany, NY)
October 17, 1999, Sunday, THREE STAR EDITION
SECTION: PERSPECTIVE, Pg. B4

LENGTH: 324 words

HEADLINE: Kiryas Joel: Strike 3

HIGHLIGHT:
It's past time the state Legislature ended its push for a separate school district

BODY:
Under saner circumstances, two rulings by the Supreme Court and another by New York's highest court that a special school district for handicapped Hasidic students in Orange County is unconstitutional would mean the end of a bad idea. The case of Kiryas Joel, however, is foreign to reason.

Kiryas Joel goes back to the Cuomo years, when the then-governor and state lawmakers tried time and again to carve out a special school district in Orange County to please an important constituency. Time and again, they were rebuffed by state and federal courts. In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Kiryas Joel, which should have ended the matter then and there. Instead, the Legislature keeps trying to redraft legislation that will evade those court rulings.

And so it goes. Last Tuesday's declaration by the Supreme Court that it won't even hear an appeal from Kiryas Joel was met not with resignation or disappointment, but rather defiance. A public school restricted to students of a particular religion continues to operate in Kiryas Joel, as it has since 1990. Worse, the latest attempt by the Legislature and the governor -- the fourth such law in all -- to create a special school district has yet to meet its inevitable constitutional challenges.

The fourth law, enacted last August, establishes even broader grounds on which communities can draw school district boundaries for the purpose of accommodating one population while excluding all others. This law never mentions Kiryas Joel by name, though. It doesn't have to.

The Pataki administration is on record as saying that 29 municipalities might be able to form separate school districts as a result. It's unlikely that they would. Far more likely is that yet another attempt to carve out a school district specifically for one religious group will be seen, by every court that reviews it, as the blatant violation of separation of church and state that it is.

LOAD-DATE: October 19, 1999