KJ’s Latest District May Also Be Illegal

(adapted from The Times Herald Record, 12/23/99)

By Judy Rife
Times-Herald-Record

KIRYAS JOEL: The village may not have enough people to qualify for its own school district, but that could change. For now, a lawsuit remains unresolved.

A state Supreme Court judge raised the possibility yesterday that the fourth Kiryas Joel School District to be created in this decade may be illegal like its predecessors.

In his decision, Justice Peter C. Patsalos said he found merit in the argument of six men that their Hasidic village failed to meet the population threshold in a 1999 state law that allows new school districts to be formed in municipalities of more than 10,000 people.

But Patsalos still denied the men’s request that he close the village’s public school pending resolution of the lawsuit. He said the plaintiffs had not shown they would suffer harm from its continued operation in that they will always have to pay property taxes to some school district – Monroe-Woodbury, if not Kiryas Joel.

“A preliminary injunction,” Patsalos wrote, “would…deprive disabled students of critical educational services.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the village expressed satisfaction with the decision. They acknowledged, as Patsalos did, that a lawsuit with so many parties and so much at stake could easily be overtaken by remedial legislation or next year’s census.

All of the state and federal lawsuits to challenge the successive New York laws that created the Kiryas Joel School District over the past 10 years have been successful, but none has interrupted its operation. The school serves about 150 handicapped Hasidic children who cannot attend the community’s private religious schools.

The village has fought to have its own school district to keep its Yiddish-speaking children with their distinctive dress and customs from being corrupted by exposure to the modern world in the mainstream public schools.

Benjamin Ostrer, the plaintiffs’ lawyer said the state Legislature erred in its haste to enact what is known as “KJ 4” in July shortly before it adjourned. The Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, already had held that KJ 3” was an unconstitutional accommodation of a religion, and few people believed the U.S. Supreme Court would hear the case for a second time.

The new law’s goal was to enable enough communities to form new school districts to avoid singling out Kiryas Joel for the kind of special treatment that the courts abhorred. The various terms and conditions, including population, appeared to apply to 29 communities. But other state laws and court decisions say population is defined as the most recent census and in 1990, Kiryas Joel had only 7,437 people. Dissidents within the Hasidic community immediately seized on this discrepancy. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October. The old district was dissolved and the new one created through a series of actions by Kiryas Joel, the Monroe-Woodbury School District and the State of New York. Then the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit – the first to contest the district on something other than constitutional grounds.

Ostrer said he believes that the new census won’t resolve the issues because the community has so many part-time and temporary, alien residents, and accurate numbers are hard to come by.

But he conceded that any remedial legislation could spotlight “KJ 4” as yet another attempt to accommodate a politically powerful religious group and set the stage for constitutional challenge.

The New York State School Boards Association has mounted all the separation of church and state arguments about the Kiryas Joel School District. A spokesman said yesterday that “KJ 4” doesn’t present any constitutional issues yet because the plaintiffs are right – the village doesn’t meet the law’s criteria.

Peter Neuman, Kiryas Joel’s attorney, voiced confidence about the integrity of the census. He said the federal estimate for the village stood at 9,986 as of July 1, 1998 and the next count should exceed 12, 000. “And if they do amend the law and that brings another lawsuit, well, how long did the last one take to reach the Supreme Court? Two years?” said Neuman. “In two years, there will be another law. At some point, this becomes an exercise in futility and the only people who benefit, who make money, are the lawyers.”