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The New York Times
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August 27, 1996, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section B;  Page 1;  Column 5;  Metropolitan Desk 

LENGTH: 811 words

HEADLINE: School District Of Kiryas Joel Is Ruled Illegal

BYLINE:  By JOSEPH BERGER 

BODY:
The State Appellate Division in Albany yesterday declared unconstitutional a special public school district carved out by former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and the State Legislature for the handicapped Hasidic children of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., in rural Orange County.

It was the second time in as many years that a law designating a Kiryas Joel school district has been struck down. In 1994, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a 1989 law creating the Hasidic district violated the Constitution's prohibition against establishment of religion.

The Appellate Division called the 1994 law re-creating the district, written in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, a "subterfuge" and a "camouflage" whose specific demographic criteria were so tailored that they benefited only the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel among the state's 1,600 municipalities. The law, the court said, thus singles out a particular religious group for favorable treatment and is unconstitutional.

The Appellate Division's 4-to-1 ruling is the latest setback in the state's effort to help the Hasidim obtain public subsidies for a school that serves only their community and is under their control. But it is not likely to end a legal and legislative battle that has raged since 1989.

Although the State Attorney General's office, which represented the Governor and the State Legislature, said yesterday that it was reviewing whether to appeal to the State Court of Appeals, George Shebitz, a lawyer for Kiryas Joel, said the village would definitely appeal. If an appeal is filed, the children would very likely be able to attend school in the district as scheduled.

The earlier state law, passed in 1989, created a special public school district for Kiryas Joel, singling the village out by name. Eleven days after the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1994, the State Legislature, prodded by Governor Cuomo, made a second attempt to benefit Kiryas Joel. It wrote a law with generalized language that permitted independent towns and villages inside larger school districts to secede and organize their own school districts if they met five criteria.

The law specified a school population range, per-pupil wealth and other factors intended to apply to Kiryas Joel. Drafters of the law, including Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, admitted that it was intended to benefit Kiryas Joel, but they argued that 28 towns and villages could also meet the criteria. Critics argued that only Kiryas Joel did.

The Appellate Division agreed and overruled a lower court decision last year by Judge Lawrence E. Kahn that the current law was religiously neutral.

"The current law brings about precisely the same result as the prior law, the creation of a special school district for the Village of Kiryas Joel and no other municipality in the state," the court's ruling said.

Kiryas Joel is 45 miles north of New York City, near Monroe, N.Y., and is made up entirely of 12,000 Satmar Hasidic Jews, the same group that predominates in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section. Nearly all its children study in private yeshivas.

For more than seven years, the Hasidim have been trying to establish a separate school district eligible for Federal and state aid that would educate a dozen severely handicapped children and 250 others classified as learning disabled. The village's officials have argued that forcing their distinctively garbed Yiddish-speaking children into a large public school district like the Monroe-Woodbury one exposes them to ridicule as well as difficulties with language comprehension.

The village's handicapped children once attended yeshivas and received government-subsidized instruction for the handicapped there. But in 1985, the United States Supreme Court barred public-school teachers from providing handicapped services on parochial school grounds, and so many of the village's handicapped children were forced to attend the Monroe-Woodbury schools.

Both the original lawsuit and the current challenge against the Kiryas Joel school district were brought by Louis Grumet, executive director of the New York State School Boards Association. He was delighted with yesterday's ruling.

"The Legislature chose to dress the wolf up in sheep's clothing and say it's a sheep, but the court said it's a wolf," he said.

The Appellate Division's ruling said there was a way for Kiryas Joel to salvage its school. It noted that two United States Supreme Court justices had asserted in the 1994 ruling that there are constitutionally permissible ways to accommodate the Satmars' needs.

This was a reference to the possibility that Monroe-Woodbury, as opposed to the Legislature, could carve out a separate neighborhood school with boundaries the same as Kiryas Joel village. Satmar leaders have spurned such a plan because it would undermine their control.


GRAPHIC: Map of New York showing location of Kiryas Joel. (pg. B5)
      

LOAD-DATE: August 27, 1996