534: A Not-So-Simple Majority

Ira Glass

Well, this week, in these troubled and divisive political times, we have this not very typical example of majority rule and what a mess it can make. Our story takes place in a suburban school district an hour north of New York City, East Ramapo, New York. Picture yards, strip-mall sprawl, box stores. Super diverse. You've got big Latino and Haitian and African American populations, some white enclaves, working-class and poor and well-off areas.

And for a long time now, Hasids have been moving in in large numbers. Hasids are ultra-religious Jews. You've seen the ones in the long black coats and the hats. The men have beards. The women keep their heads covered in public. Like the Amish, they prefer to keep to themselves, so they don't send their kids to public schools. They send them to religious schools called yeshivas, where Yiddish is spoken as the primary language. And in East Ramapo, mostly the Hasids are poor. They're lower middle class.

And here was their situation. Because they're living in the suburbs, they're paying high property taxes, which, of course, are high because they're paying for local public schools, which their kids don't go to. And then they're also paying for these private schools, these yeshivas. So they're getting squeezed, right?

And as the Hasidic population got bigger and bigger, that became an issue. Because in New York, these suburban school district budgets go up for a public vote. As the Hasids numbers increase, there were enough of them that they could conceivably go to the polls and vote down the school budget, force cuts. Though, kind of remarkably, that did not happen. And it didn't happen because the public schools and the Hasids worked out a deal, a truce.

Steve White is an activist in school board politics in town.

Ira Glass

In other words, the school board won't call in the state to check and see if math and reading and history are being properly taught in the yeshivas, like the state mandates, if the Hasids would just stay away from the polls. Jason Friedman was superintendent for East Ramapo schools for eight years. He says the truce is actually even cruder than that. He says that the yeshivas are entitled to money from public school budgets for certain things like buses and books.

And he says the deal was to give the Jewish schools as much money as was legal. Friedman says he would regularly meet with Hasidic rabbis and yeshiva administrators. His pitch was always, we will give you whatever we can. Just don't vote down our budgets.

Ira Glass

So the Hasidic population grew. And here's a curious demographic fact about East Ramapo. Most of the people in East Ramapo were not Hasids, but most of the children were. Two out of three children in the school district were Hasidic.

And the Hasids felt cheated because property taxes kept going up to pay for these schools that most of the kids in the district did not attend. And also, the monies and services that the public schools were supposed to be giving the Hasidic schools, they didn't feel like it was enough. So the detente ended.

Our story this week is about what happened once it fell apart. And I should say, if you think that you have heard your share of stories about school board fights, what happened next, I totally assure you was like nothing you have probably seen in any school district anywhere. Because it raised such basic questions.

It's usually, you know, just a given in our country that people who don't drive still pay taxes for roads, and people who hate the outdoors pay for public parks, and people without kids in the public schools pay for the public schools. Just that's the deal. We all know it. And so what happens when people who do not want to pay for the public schools take over the school board? We're devoting our whole hour to this today.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If, by the way, you're listening to this by podcast or internet, there is some cursing in this show, and we have unbeeped the curses in this internet version of the episode. If you prefer a beeped episode, you can get that at our website.

Ben Calhoun spent months visiting East Ramapo over the course of 2013 and 2014. This is a rerun of our show from a few years ago. He tells the story.

Ben Calhoun

The dispute that finally shattered the truth in East Ramapo-- there's no way around this-- it's kind of regulate-y and fussy. But this is what ended the peace, what sent the East Ramapo school district into a political brawl that's lasted years. The dispute had to do with special ed students-- Hasidic special ed students.

Ben Calhoun

Yossi Gestetner is a political operative, an activist, in the Hasidic communities. He said the problem had to do with the fact that Hasidic special ed students, like other special ed kids, they need expensive therapies and services and education. And the government will pay for those, is required to pay for them. But for that to happen, the district would usually require that the kids go into a public school setting.

The Hasidic and the ultra-Orthodox live in closed communities. And the private yeshivas they send their children to are all Hasidic kids. So just picture-- you're a Hasidic parent with a special needs kid-- maybe with developmental and emotional issues-- and people are telling you, you want to get your kid the help they need, you gotta yank them out of the environment where they're the most comfortable-- the only environment they've ever known-- and send them elsewhere.

Ben Calhoun

In other words, you're going to spend the money anyways. What do you care if it goes to a yeshiva?

But it's not that simple. You can't do that because of federal education regulations. The government says if it's going to pay for special ed students, then they have to be placed in mainstream environments as much as possible. Congress made that the law because, for years, our country had a real problem-- that special ed kids were being warehoused and isolated. And according to the law, public schools are just considered to be more mainstream than private religious schools.

So in East Ramapo, Hasidic parents would often go to the school district and they'd ask for their special ed children to be put in private yeshivas using government money. The school district would say, sorry, we have to follow the law, and the law says no-- which I brought up with Yossi Gestetner.

Ben Calhoun

These complaints and frustrations grew and grew year after year. And so did the Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox population. Eventually, that population was at a point where it wasn't big enough to do what Gestetner is saying-- change the damn law-- but it was big enough to do something else.

Ben Calhoun

This is Mimi Calhoun. She's a former East Ramapo school parent elected to the school board in 2004. She showed me the school board voting results from the last few decades, how things changed around 2007, 2008, when the Hasidim made a move for control of the school system by taking over the school board.

I want to just say, when you hear these totals, the numbers are going to maybe sound small. Remember, these are suburban school board elections. People winning with a few thousand or even a few hundred votes-- that's the norm in any district around here.

Ben Calhoun

Aron Wieder was one of the first Hasidic candidates elected to the board.

Ben Calhoun

This is Suzanne Young-Mercer. She's another former school board member. And like she's saying, it's remarkable to look at these elections, to see how the totals start climbing after 2007. It makes me think of that Bugs Bunny cartoon with Elmer Fudd, where they're racing up in the barber chairs. Vote totals go from 5,000 to 8,000, 13,000 16,000 18,000. You can see both sides turn it up, though the Hasidic-backed candidate's always a little bit out front.

Lots of people on the public school side talk about this with bitterness and awe. They tell these stories about Hasidic voters dressed in black filing out of buses.

Ben Calhoun

The takeover was gradual. The East Ramapo school board has nine members, but only three seats go up for election every year. By 2008, the majority was six Hasidic/ultra-Orthodox, three traditional public school folks.

Once the Hasidic majority took control, at first many of the ways it started to remake the district were incremental-- changes to personnel and administration here and there. Kind of quickly, though, restricting the budget and reining in property taxes became a preoccupation. The school board determines the property tax levy when it sets its budget. Controlling taxes meant trimming corners off the budget, dropping extracurriculars, sports teams, cutting music teachers in elementary schools.

Ben Calhoun

In response, parents and students started to get involved, showing up at board meetings to criticize and question. Grumbling and grousing spiked in this whole new way when the Hasidic-dominated board predicted declining enrollment for the district. And as a result, it planned to close two schools.

Ben Calhoun

With all the growth in the Hasidic community, people knew there was an intense need for land and buildings for private Jewish schools. So almost immediately, there was speculation the shuttered public buildings would be sold to yeshivas. Gradually, the boardroom took on a new dynamic.

Ben Calhoun

Eventually, on one side of the room, you'd have the public school parents and students. They're mostly black, Latino, some recent immigrants, many poor. More than 70% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch. And then up on the dais, you'd have the Hasidic/Orthodox majority, governing the future of a school system that they'd never send their own kids to.

Amid the mounting controversy, the Hasidic majority started this regular routine, saying the board needed to go into executive session-- private session in a back room.

Ben Calhoun

The board would stay locked away for hours on end. Two hours, three hours. And with the board gone, parents and students who had school and work the next day, they'd be left waiting in the boardroom until 11, 12 o'clock at night, waiting for a chance to speak.

Steadily, the wounds and the bruises and the contentious issues multiplied. But if there was a real shot across the bow, one move that transformed a nasty feud into an all-out war, it came down to one particular board meeting, one night, and this dramatic personnel change.

[DOOR OPENING]

November 18, 2009. This is the board meeting where all this happened. At the meeting, the board did what had become so usual. It called for an executive session and it started walking out. But as that happened, something unusual took place.

The remaining, quote unquote, "public school advocates" on the board-- this is the minority-- they stopped on their way out of the room. Generally, they didn't associate with the activists and the parents who'd show up. But tonight, they walked right up to them, and they pleaded. Essentially, what they said was, no matter how long we're behind closed doors, whatever you do tonight, please do not leave.

Ben Calhoun

The board didn't come back into the room until nearly a quarter to 1:00 in the morning. And when they get back, what gets put on the table is this kind of puzzling proposal to fire the district's law firm of many years and hire a new guy. And I say puzzling because listen to the specifics.

The old lawyer was a local guy, had gone to school in the district, even. He'd done the system's legal work for years and years. And the administration, by every account that I've heard, they really liked him. He charged $120 an hour.

The new lawyer was a guy named Al D'Agostino. He was from out on Long Island, more than an hour away. And his contract, it would be for $250 an hour, plus $125 an hour for travel.

Add to that this. The new guy had been caught up in a pension investigation by the state of New York. Not exactly desirable. And a confusing move, right? Especially if money is a concern. But people in the room were not confused when this came up. They knew very well who D'Agostino was.

D'Agostino had recently been in the news for representing another school district, one in Lawrence, Long Island. D'Agostino had been involved in a controversial plan that that board was trying to push through-- a plan to close a school.

Ben Calhoun

Parents out in Lawrence alleged the plan was to close the school in question and then sell it to a yeshiva. And in fact, it would later be sold to a yeshiva.

Ben Calhoun

So prior to this meeting, people in Lawrence, Long Island, had been in touch with the public school crowd in East Ramapo. They said, this lawyer is helping our school board do these controversial things. First, they're shutting the school. And also, he's doing this thing where he's helping them put special education students in private yeshivas using public money. Anyway, we've heard your district might hire him. We wanted to warn you.

Ben Calhoun

In the video of this meeting from this night in East Ramapo, as soon as the majority proposes changing law firms, things unravel super fast. Before you know it, pretty much everyone other than the Hasidic majority is trying to stop the hiring of the new lawyer.

The superintendent projects that hiring D'Agostino will cost the cash-strapped district as much as $900,000 more per year. Remember, this is already a district that's trimming its budget. The superintendent and the public school advocates on the board, they ask over and over just where is that money going to come from?

While all that's happening, the half dozen public school parents and activists left in the room, they heckle the board.

Ben Calhoun

Sometimes they just shout the board down.

Ben Calhoun

Perhaps no one tries more desperately to put the brakes on this whole thing than the superintendent at the time. He argues and he pleads and he says, we don't have the money. He also says this whole plan is half-baked and sloppy. He points out that there's no strategy to hand off the district's current cases from the old lawyers to the new one.

Ben Calhoun

He says, in disbelief, the district has cases in court tomorrow. There's no reason to do this so hastily.

Ben Calhoun

The superintendent is still asking where all the money will come from when Aron Wieder, the leader of the Hasidic majority, cuts him off, calls for a vote.

Ben Calhoun

Five members in the Hasidic majority vote yes. The three other board members present vote no. The motion passes, and Al D'Agostino becomes the board's new lawyer.

With the new lawyer, Al D'Agostino, at the legal rudder, the board forged ahead with the two school closures. Remember, the reasoning had been that the board was predicting a significant decrease in public school enrollment. Enrollment never actually did decline. But the two schools were shuttered and put on the market, and the board eventually sold both to yeshivas.

It also changed its approach to special ed placements. It replaced the district's head of special education, who Hasidic parents had had a ton of beef with, and then the district started placing special ed students in private Jewish schools in very large numbers.

You might wonder, how would they do that if it's against the law? The answer is Al D'Agostino, who imported a strategy he'd used in the other school district.

Now, I won't get into all the gritty details here, but the short of it is that D'Agostino kind of cut a messy loophole into the regulations, one that allowed the board to put special education students into yeshivas using public money. These questionable placements were soon piling up in East Ramapo. And state officials were desperately trying to intervene, warning the district that the practice was against the law.

Also high on the priorities list for the new Hasidic majority was reining in property taxes. And with the levers of power now in its possession, it launched what's pretty much been a systematic defunding of the East Ramapo public schools. Just to get a picture of how this played out inside the schools, I went to a high school principal named Jean Fields. She'd just retired from one of the district's two high schools, Ramapo High School.

Ben Calhoun

Fields showed me four yearbooks from when the school board really started cutting. You can actually see the yearbooks get thinner and thinner and thinner.

Ben Calhoun

Fields went page by page, showing me what was cut. The business department-- that was several pages-- all eliminated.

Ben Calhoun

There were other departments cut by 80%. Full pages of honor societies, sports, JROTC, AP classes, clubs, dance, home ec, administrative staff. District-wide, the cuts have been sweeping.

Here's a partial list from the last five years. All deans, all social workers eliminated. All assistant principals at the elementary school level, music instruction for elementary school kids, funding for field trip buses-- all eliminated. That came with cuts to administration, guidance counselors, teaching assistants, maintenance, assistant principals, among lots of others. Kindergarten was reduced from full-day to half-day. System-wide over the last six years, the district's laid off 22% of all its teachers. At one point, Jean Fields says, there got to be so few teachers in her building, there was a conversation about whether the school should just let seniors go halfway through the day.

[DRUM LINE PLAYING]

From what I can tell, nothing and no one was sacred. Most high schools have things that are sources of pride. It might be a sports team or a theatre program, a debate team. For Fields' school, it was their marching band. It won big awards. It was featured in the Denzel Washington remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In 2012, the board laid off the band's director.

Ben Calhoun

Olivia Castor went to Spring Valley, the other of the district's two high schools. She was there during the biggest cutbacks. And while she was there, so many teachers were laid off, students started having a hard time filling their schedules with actual classes, a complaint that Castor took to the board, where she was told the problem wasn't real.

Ben Calhoun

Castor set out to prove the problem was real. She gathered evidence into this eight-page packet that she showed to me. It includes real student schedules from her high school. These are from 2012, so this is a snapshot from later in the cutbacks.

Ben Calhoun

The former principal, Jean Fields, she confirmed this was a problem in her school, too. At one point, she told the administration the problem was so bad some kids might take five years to graduate because they just couldn't take enough required classes. Just to say, the reason this situation could exist-- New York State education law has no regulations about how many hours of instruction a student actually has to get throughout the school day.

Olivia Castor eventually took the schedules she'd collected and showed them to the school board. I asked her how they responded. She said, they told me those must be fake.

As you can imagine, this course of events, this kind of breakdown, this kind of environment, it's produced a sprawling epic of public confrontation. Year after year filled with all the usual kinds of events-- rallies outside Central Office, press conferences, handmade signs, student walkouts, sit-ins. Though even the predictable events often have these details that seem to speak to the peculiarity of this specific war. Like, say, protests where hundreds of students fill a gymnasium and chant things like, "Cut the lawyer."

Ben Calhoun

Another unique part of this big, sprawling fight is that, with the board regularly shutting itself behind closed doors in executive session, in their absence, parents and students would end up holding these strange, impromptu, non-meeting meetings, where they only had each other to talk to. There's a video that I can't quite shake of a meeting like this. It's from December 2012, a meeting about possible budget cuts. Among the parents, there's a mother. Her name is Cassandra Edwards.

Ben Calhoun

As Edwards takes the mic, she stands in front of this auditorium. She's still in her winter coat, facing the crowd. And as she starts to talk, you can see that the board has left the room. They've gone into executive session. All their empty chairs are on the auditorium stage behind her, one for each public official who won't hear anything she's about to say.

Ben Calhoun

I just want to pause here because you'll notice the crowd, they're totally with her. But as she keeps talking, she gets more and more upset, and it turns into this kind of upset that it's hard to cheer for.

Ben Calhoun

Less often, but occasionally, folks from the Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities would show up at board meetings, and they'd return fire. In this video, a man named Jay Grossman lays into the public school parents and students.

Ben Calhoun

Gradually, shouting, open hostility, profanity, that became the norm on the school board. And in terms of how deep the political chasm got, there's a couple artifacts I'll include for you. The first is just an anecdote.

At one point, people close to this situation who thought this breach could be repaired, they tried to broker peace talks, a sort of diplomacy summit. A lawyer that specializes in negotiations was brought in. He was a former sergeant in the Israeli military, and folks thought he could make inroads with both sides. Someone close to the negotiation says everybody sat down and the Hasidic leadership was blunt. In about these words, a Hasidic board member said, we have all the power. Why would we negotiate? If we do, we only have things to lose.

There's also a candid document, one that points to the political will behind the board and what it was doing. It's this letter written around the time when all this was beginning. A prominent real estate developer in the Hasidic community, a man named Yehuda Weissmandl, wrote a letter to the local newspaper.

"Dear fellow taxpayer in the East Ramapo school district, again and again, I read about how upset you are about the members of the school board, how we bloc-voted them in, how we don't have the interests of the schoolchildren at heart. Well, let's take a closer look at that.

For many years, you took our tax money-- year after year, increase after increase-- and you never had any problem with that. But when we finally get together and say that's enough, that is a problem.

I have a solution. How about giving all of us the option to bow out of the public school system and keep our money in our pockets? You want our money and our silence. Sorry, you cannot have it all your way."

The author of that letter, Yehuda Weissmandl, is now the president of the East Ramapo school board.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun. Coming up, ugliness gets uglier. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. We're hearing today about a strange case of what democracy and what majority rule can look like. It's the story of the East Ramapo, New York, school district, where a group of parents whose kids did not attend public schools took over the public school board for years. In East Ramapo, the non-Hasidic families continued in each election cycle to try to win additional seats on the school board, turn back the Hasidic majority. They never were able to. Ben Calhoun's story from 2014 continues.

Ben Calhoun

I've tried to talk to Hasidic members of the board, current and former. I've made multiple requests in person and on the phone to talk to Aron Wieder, the first leader of the majority. I've also reached out multiple times to the current board president. Neither will return my calls. I've issued a blanket invitation to the whole school board, which is now made up entirely of Hasidic-backed members. I've done that twice via the district clerk with no takers.

The one Hasidic board member who would talk to me is a former board president named Morris Kohn. He sat on the school board from 2009 to 2011, so he was there for some of the most severe cuts. Kohn told me he'd talk to me because he didn't want people to think he'd been, quote, "a madman." This is how Kohn says the story went from the Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox side. He says, flat out, the community wanted control of the board to do all the things we've outlined-- rein in property taxes, change special ed, and to make sure private yeshiva students got all the government money they could for things like busing and books.

Ben Calhoun

Let me explain the second part of what Kohn had to say because this is less obvious. Kohn says going into all this, the Hasidic community saw the public schools as a system in trouble, bloated with unions and inefficiency, and a good slap of fiscal conservatism would go a long way.

But then, once the Hasidim had control, there were all kinds of external financial factors that came crashing down-- the recession, the state property tax cap. And like school districts all across the state, he says, East Ramapo was suddenly super hard-up.

Ben Calhoun

Kohn says it wouldn't have mattered who was on the board. Cuts were inevitable. But he says there was so much mistrust, nobody could see this.

Ben Calhoun

This argument-- that cuts were inevitable in East Ramapo, that they were making the same tough choices as other districts-- it's not supported by the facts.

I've analyzed the budgets of all the school districts in the county for the last 10 years. All the other regular school districts in the area, districts that faced the same economy and made it through without the same kinds of massive cuts, the main thing they were doing was raising property taxes. During the five years that East Ramapo was making its biggest cuts, all of the normal neighboring school districts raised their property taxes by an average of more than 25% just to get by. During the same five years in East Ramapo, the Hasidic-controlled board raised taxes by just 9%.

Some more numbers. During the last 10 years, every comparable school district in the county grew its budget by an average of 50%. East Ramapo's budget grew by 33%. Which, to a layperson, you might say, well, oh, the budget grew. How bad could that be? I actually kind of thought that at first.

But I talked to school administrators and experts who said that the costs the Hasidim and other conservatives say are out of control actually are rising alarmingly fast-- pensions, health care, union contracts, cost of living. Those things grow by so much that a 30% budget increase, that isn't growth. That's devastation.

One uniquely volatile element in this chemical reaction, something unexpected that's become a chapter unto itself, is the outsized role of the board's controversial lawyer, Albert D'Agostino. In some ways, it seems like he was just symbolic because of how he was hired. In that way, he became a sort of hood ornament for the Hasidic majority.

But in other ways, he became an actual central player. He's functioned as an overt advocate for the Hasidic majority in board meetings. He's become a fixture at the end of the board table, right up on the dais. After months of going to meetings, I found he acts like an unusual combination of attorney, legal architect, consigliere, and bully. A lot of the time, if board members shy away from conflict, D'Agostino steps in as a combatant.

A video of one board meeting that gives you a sense of this-- a few months after D'Agostino arrived, a former student came to a meeting.

Ben Calhoun

Lorenzo Labitigan was a district graduate in his first year at Yale, and he'd come back because he'd heard there were possible cuts to advanced placement classes. He wanted to plead to keep those. At some point, he makes a comment about D'Agostino, about how the board's paying all this added money for a lawyer.

Then he says something about D'Agostino having stained credentials. He's referring to the fact that the state of New York accused D'Agostino of illegitimately taking a state pension. Anyway, the kid says "stained credentials."

Ben Calhoun

D'Agostino jumps in and the crowd erupts.

Ben Calhoun

It's hard to hear him in there. D'Agostino's cutting off the student's comment, saying, "Mr. Chairman, if I might-- if I might--"

Ben Calhoun

Right there, the student's asking quizzically, are you threatening me?

Ben Calhoun

OK, for the record, as far as these pension allegations go, the New York Comptroller's Office accused D'Agostino of taking a $106,000-per-year New York State pension, one the state says he wasn't eligible for because he wasn't a government employee.

There's lots of videos of D'Agostino blowing up, yelling at parents, school administrators, pointing fingers in people's faces. There's a well-known incident when D'Agostino verbally abused one of the public school parents. According to a newspaper reporter who saw this, an Honor Roll student came to the parent's defense, and D'Agostino called the kid a piece of shit, asking the child, "Do you want a piece of me?"

Still, though, the most remarkable example of the bizarro role the school board's law firm has taken on in this conflict, it doesn't actually involve D'Agostino but another attorney from his firm, a lawyer named Chris Kirby. The set-up here is in a board meeting. The lawyer, Kirby, he smirked at a public school parent while she was talking about her special needs kid. When the lawyer, Kirby, eventually left that meeting, an activist named Tony Luciano, he called Kirby an asshole.

But so Kirby leaves. He's gone. The meeting ends. This group of parents and activists walk out. Luciano, who videotapes every board meeting, is still rolling as they leave. In this video, you see the sidewalk as the parents head to the parking lot. And then a car drives up. I had Luciano, the activist, walk me through what happened.

Ben Calhoun

The lawyer, Kirby, walks right up to the parents. He's the first one you hear in this next clip.

Ben Calhoun

At this point, the lawyer, Kirby, he walks back to his car. Parents are saying, take a picture of his license plate. And Kirby stands next to his car, giving the parents the middle finger. And he keeps saying--

Ben Calhoun

Here you go.

Ben Calhoun

Take a picture. Take a picture.

Ben Calhoun

The women get on their phones and they call the cops. And then-- I don't even know. Things just go bananas.

Ben Calhoun

After this happened, there was a lot of outcry-- embarrassing coverage, newspaper editorials. The board did say this was too much. It announced publicly it would get rid of D'Agostino's firm. But it would actually take them two years before they'd cut ties with him and the law firm.

If I can, I need to change gears here and talk about part of this story that you may have noticed-- that this whole story treads near some of the most destructive anti-Semitic stereotypes in existence. In the last several years, as East Ramapo has divided into us versus them, questions of anti-Semitism have cut a wide path.

There have been troubling incidents, cases of kids throwing rocks at school buses full of Hasidic yeshiva students. In one case, a rock hit a young boy and fractured his skull. Last summer, three teenagers drove into Hasidic neighborhoods, shooting at people on the street with a paintball gun. They later told police they'd gone out that night to, quote, "shoot Jews."

While a lot of activists, parents, and students have tried to keep anyone associated with them from venturing into anti-Semitism, most people have seen glimpses of it. Olivia Castor, the student with the schedules, she told me about organizing rallies to protest the board.

Ben Calhoun

I heard more than one story about students, some very young, going up to teachers and asking, why are the Jews doing this to us? And this dynamic takes a simple political turf war-- a school board fight-- and it turns it into something uglier on all sides.

Ben Calhoun

This is Tony Luciano again, the guy who tapes all the meetings, the guy who gets confronted in the parking lot. A few years ago, Luciano ran for school board and someone put up a video against him. I had him show it to me.

Ben Calhoun

The video is essentially an attack ad. A school board election attack ad. In it, there's a clip of Luciano making a comment about Hasidic board members washing their hands of the consequences of their actions, which, for complicated reasons having to do with Pontius Pilate and 2,000 years of Jewish history, this ad says is code for anti-Semitism. And then violin music kicks in.

Ben Calhoun

One of the other public school activists, Peggy Hatton, the mom who gets cursed out in the parking lot, a while ago someone took a picture of her, put a mustache on it, split-screened it with a picture of Hitler, and that got tweeted through the Hasidic and Orthodox community.

The tension of all of this-- real anti-Semitism, accusations of anti-Semitism, the fear of anti-Semitism, and the fear of being accused of anti-Semitism-- it casts a fog over this whole situation. There's an incident from a school board meeting. It's kind of well-known by people here.

It was the board president at the time, Daniel Schwartz, who was leading the Hasidic majority in 2012. And he gave this eight-minute speech at a board meeting. Public school activists have nicknamed it Schwartz's Rant. He starts out by bringing up a few different troubling incidents.

Ben Calhoun

The thing that Schwartz does after this, where things get super complicated, he starts to cast a blanket accusation of anti-Semitism over all the people who had been opposing the school board's decisions. He starts by bringing up a student who'd come to a meeting to challenge the board.

Ben Calhoun

To complicate all this even more, consider the racial dynamics of this situation. On one side, the Hasidim, all white. On the other side, the public school families, almost entirely black and Latino. But in school board meetings, in rallies, campaign literature, interestingly, racism doesn't come up the way anti-Semitism does. The activists told me they try to leave it off the table because they know how explosive it is. But in private conversations, it comes up.

I spent months talking to people on both sides of this situation, and I think whatever role anti-Semitism has in all of this, the bigger split is the chasm between an isolationist religious community and everyone else. I think secular people sense from these religious groups an implied disdain and disapproval for their way of life. And in return, secular people feel a disdain and disapproval back towards the religious community over lots of issues, including things like how these groups often treat women. This animosity, it's ambient, and it's hard to pin down. But it's corrosive.

Ben Calhoun

Suzanne Young-Mercer deals with all kinds of people in her job running the emergency room at Mount Sinai, one of New York's largest hospitals. Again, she served on the school board. And she told me this anecdote that encapsulates a lot of what I saw in Ramapo.

Ben Calhoun

Turned out, it was Friday-- Sabbath-- and the woman had a switch that she wasn't allowed to flip on her fridge. Young-Mercer went in and flipped it for her.

Ben Calhoun

I don't think Suzanne Young-Mercer is anti-Semitic. But I do think anytime you say, I know in my heart what everyone from this one particular group thinks and feels, that's trouble. And in East Ramapo, that trouble is all around you.

There are enough Hasidim to control the local school board in East Ramapo, but there aren't enough to control New York State. And increasingly, the board is not just at war with the parents and their district, but with state government.

In 2010 and again in 2012, the New York State Education Department reviewed what the district was doing-- placing Hasidic special ed students in private schools using public money. Both times, the state said, stop what you're doing. It's against both federal and state law. We'll cut your funding. This changed nothing. The district did not comply. What it did was sue the state. The court said the state was right, but the board is appealing.

In 2011, the New York State Comptroller conducted an audit of the district's finances. The audit determined that the board has engaged in inaccurate record-keeping with discrepancies in the millions of dollars, loose monitoring of money going to private schools, sloppy bill payment, and just all kinds of bad management.

The other big category here is the district's real estate deals. The board did close two schools and sold them to yeshivas. One of those deals, in particular, it's been a complete mess. In short, the district got a bid from a yeshiva for the building. The bid was for $3 million. The school building was appraised at $6 million. So that's a hard deal to justify-- until the board rushed out and got the school reappraised for $3 million and sold it to the yeshiva at that price. Activists challenged the new appraisal, and the state took their side and nixed the deal. The appraiser recently pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

Just this summer, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed a monitor to watch the district. The district's response? The current board president wrote a letter saying the state was, quote, "acceding to the demands of bigots and lending officials sanction to their prejudice," end quote.

Ben Calhoun

This past May, I met up with public school activist Steve White. This was school board election day. I stood in the booth with him as he wrote in Governor Cuomo three times for the East Ramapo school board. He had to do that because, for the first time since all this started, there were no public school candidates running. After years of not winning a single race, the public school crowd failed to recruit anybody to run.

During much of this fight, Steve was kind of the field general for the public school side. We stood outside his polling place, where, in recent years, he says there were huge lines. But today, there was no one. We were the only two people on the sidewalk.

Ben Calhoun

White says, these days, even if his fellow public school activists organize better than ever, he doesn't think they could win a seat. The Hasidic community is now just too big. He estimates they're half of registered voters now. That door is closed, he told me.

Eventually, he stopped the car at Hillcrest Elementary School. This is the school that was appraised for $6 million and sold for $3 million to a yeshiva. The state stepped in and voided the sale, but it eventually went through this summer for $4.9 million.

We walked around the back of the building, and you could see why the school was so sought after. Directly behind it sits one of the largest Hasidic communities in the area. The only thing separating the two was a field and a small chain-link fence.

Ben Calhoun

As we stood there, a steady stream of Hasidic families made their way through a hole in the fence and towards the school building. Though, today, they weren't there for school, for the yeshiva. This was election day, and this yeshiva, it doubles as a polling place. The Hasidic families walking towards the building, they were all on their way to cast their votes.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun is one of the producers of our show. So right after this program first aired back in 2014, the fiscal monitor from the state wrote up a report about East Ramapo, calling it, quote, "a school district in crisis." Since then, the state legislator has continued keeping an eye on the district, appointing new monitors, and passing a bill that requires the state education commissioner to approve the local East Ramapo school board budget.

In the pension case against Al D'Agostino-- thats the one that accused him of getting a state pension while not a state employee, the case that led the student to say that he had stained credentials-- the state ended up ruling in favor of D'Agostino.

In the 2015 school board elections, there were pro-public school candidates on the ballot again. Today, one of them is on the board. This past school year, the school board accepted funds from the state to restore some of the things that have been cut. All-day kindergarten was brought back, along with some music and art classes. Public school advocates say that things are slowly getting better. Just this week, the community voted on and passed a budget that increases summer programs, arts, bilingual classes, and special education.

[MUSIC - "DON'T THROW MY VOTE AWAY" BY DAVE STEIN]

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.