Learning Democracy

One hour north of New York City, a small school district in Rockland County has been coping with one of the most intense local election battles in recent memory over education and the consequences of tyranny through a simple-majority.

East Ramapo School District is a residential suburban area covering 35 square miles of an incredibly diverse group of New Yorkers. The fiscal monitor for the state’s education department characterizes the district as “high need, low resource.” The community is made up of an Orthodox Jewish population and a predominately African American and Latino community. Orthodox Jewish students are roughly two-thirds of the school-aged population, educated almost entirely in yeshivas, religious private schools where Yiddish is the primary instructional language. Many students in these private schools have disabilities, requiring special educational services and qualifying for additional educational funds from the state and federal government.

The other one-third of students are educated in the local public schools: 78 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch prices and 91 percent come from African American, Latino, and Haitian backgrounds.

How the community broke down into absolute disarray is a nuanced and complicated story, covered beautifully and extensively by Ben Calhoun in "This American Life." In short, the Hasidic community became fed up when confronted with the prospect of being unable to keep a student with special needs in a yeshiva while also receiving the appropriate government funds.

For years, these Hasids felt that they’d paid a disproportionate amount of taxes for schools their students didn’t even attend, and were furious when they couldn’t even get the financial support they needed.

So members of the Jewish Orthodox community decided to run for seats on the school board. The electoral gains were gradual, but one decade later, the school board for East Ramapo School District is made up of a majority from the Hasidic community whose children attend private yeshivas.

And the new majority made some serious changes. Public schools were closed and sold, class sizes increased, music classes eliminated, and extracurricular programs and AP classes cut. The shock of fiscal conservatism was made worse by the Recession and growing school age population: The school board cut funding for public instruction and increased funding for busing to the private schools and legal counsel for the board. Activists for the local public school describe trying frequently to attend school board meetings, only to have members go into closed session until the early hours of the morning to create a resolution—after working parents have had to leave for the night.

School board meetings have devolved into screaming, explicit insults, and personal threats. One side is fighting for their right to a basic education, and the other for the authority granted to them as democratically elected officials acting for a majority of the district. Historic sensitivities around racism and anti-Semitism are exacerbated, and fundamental disagreements about the role of education and the normative goals of majority rule exposed. And the staunch inability to compromise on either side has left an estranged community trying to overcome immense internal hostility.

Though the engaging presidential election has captivated most of the public’s attention going into November, competitive elections up and down the ballot should not and cannot be neglected. The stakes of the presidential election are certainly high, with the opportunity to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, define the U.S.’s involvement with the refugee crisis, and address much needed tax and prison reform. But some of the most pressing issues facing our democracy are playing out in our own neighborhoods, all around us, at the local level. The economic and racial divides demonstrated in East Ramapo are not specific to East Ramapo—they are divides inherent in the fabric of our democracy that build on the decisions we make at every level of government, for better or for worse.

There are no seats on the East Ramapo School Board that will be contested in November, but there are seats contested in the various state house and senate districts that represent Rockland County—officials who are fighting for state intervention to supply aid and mediation for the district. And though most of us won’t vote in East Ramapo's district, we are responsible for engaging with our own local politics. We can help build a better nation just by caring a bit more for the community directly around us, even when and especially if we aren’t directly affected by the government policies up for referenda in the coming election.

Caroline M. Tervo ’18 is a government concentrator living in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.