The East Ramapo Central School District in Rockland County has been troubled for years. At its heart, it’s educational segregation. On its face, it’s a collision of race and culture.

About 30,000 white children represent 99% of the private school population. These are ultra-Orthodox children who attend private Yeshivas. 

About 9,000 students of color represent 96% of the public school population. 

Yet fiscal monitors report that the school board, which is dominated by members of the ultra-Orthodox community, has funded bussing and special education for the Yeshivas, to the detriment of the public schools where teachers and programs have been cut, graduation rates have fallen and where nearly 47% of students are considered chronically absent.

Since 2014, the fiscal monitors appointed by the Board of Regents have not been able to shake the hold that the ultra-Orthodox school board has over financial decision-making. 

That may soon change.

The NAACP and the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the East Ramapo School District in federal court over the civil rights of the public school students and won. 

Lawyers for the public school students argued that East Ramapo’s system of voting for school board members was discriminatory. All school board members were elected on an at-large basis by all the voters of the district.

At-large voting is widely seen as discriminatory. 

Here is how the NAACP describes it:

At-large methods of election are often discriminatory because they, in combination with racially polarized voting, prevent voters of color from electing their candidates of choice where they are not the majority in the jurisdiction. Under this system, the votes of voters of color often are drowned out or submerged by the votes of a majority of white voters who often do not support the candidates preferred by Black voters.

U.S. District Court Judge Cathy Seibel agreed with the NYCLU and NAACP, so she instituted a ward system of voting instead.

“If Black Lives Matter in New York, and if we are really going to reckon with racism, then we cannot allow East Ramapo racism to thrive,” NYCLU’s Donna Lieberman told Capital Tonight.

In a move to strengthen state oversight of East Ramapo, Assemblyman Ken Zebrowski and Senator Elijah Reichlin-Melnick have introduced a bill that would give East Ramapo’s state-appointed fiscal monitors broad powers to rein in misguided school board decisions and ensure that the needs of children in the district's public schools are represented. 

According to Senator Reichlin-Melnick, there has been repeated concerns from the state, comptroller audits and other findings that warrant this dramatic shift.

“The reality is that the financial situation in this district is very problematic,” Reichlin-Melnick said.  “They had to borrow $25 million to make it through this fiscal year.”

When asked about the kind of board decisions a monitor might veto, Reichlin-Melnick said the monitor could veto decisions about contracts, layoffs and school closures, among other issues.

“My hope is that the monitor would use the power as leverage to negotiate with the board so that the board makes the right decision to begin with, rather than vetoing this and vetoing that.”

According to Lieberman, the monitor would work closely with the State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa. 

“(The bill) gives the monitor authority, but it also supports a partnership between the monitor and the Commissioner of Education,” Lieberman said. “We think the commissioner has a pivotal role here, and we are delighted that Rosa has tried to rein in the District’s profligate spending.”

Attorney Hank Greenberg was East Ramapo’s first fiscal monitor, appointed back in 2014. A shareholder in the firm Greenberg Traurig and the immediate past president of the New York State Bar Association, told Capital Tonight that he came away from the experience with an idea: to ask the Legislature to give veto power to a fiscal monitor as a way to derail some of the school board’s more inequitable ideas.  

Greenberg’s idea was included in his report to the State Board of Regents and subsequently informed Senator Reichlin-Melnick’s bill. 

He spoke with Capital Tonight about why such a dramatic move is necessary.

“The statutes that are currently on the books, the regulations, all assume, they don’t require, but they assume that you will have a school district and a board with people on the board who understand intuitively, and also by experience, the needs of the public school community,” Greenberg explained.  “You didn’t have that in the East Ramapo School District at the time, and I understand that that is still the case.”

Greenberg said the only way to address the current statutory scheme is by giving veto power to a fiscal monitor.

The New York State School Boards Association does not have a position on the bill. 

Multiple messages to the East Ramapo school board were not returned. 

Referring to how the East Ramapo School Board treats public school students, the NYCLU’s Donna Lieberman concluded by saying, “This, Susan, is 21^st Century Jim Crow. It’s a shanda,” she said, using the Yiddish work for “shameful.”