9486 in the collection
It's Their Building. . . Let Them Fix It. . . And They Can Eat Cake While They're At It
Ohanian Comment: This situation is outrageous for a number of reasons. If you think "It's New York," then consider the plight of school buildings across the country. For starters, see the report card given school buildings by the American Society of Civil Engineers:
http://susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=55
In a lawsuit heard last year in the magnificent chambers of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, lawyers for New York argued that the state constitution only guarantees your children an eighth-grade education.
Gov. George Pataki's legal team based its theory on a scholarly reading of the state's original constitution, which was written in the 18th century.
It was a very interesting argument. Even more interesting, the Appellate Division, in a 4-1 decision, agreed with Pataki's team about what children deserve. In its ruling, the court said that an eighth grade education was all a person needed to read the newspaper and sit on a jury. And if a person could do that, the person was a good-enough citizen, which was the only standard the state was obliged to meet in educating kids.
That ruling - like something from the Jim Crow South - was technically the law of the land until it was overturned by the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals. And that only happened on June 26, 2003.
I mention this by way of lending some perspective to the strange response from Pataki's education department last week when informed that the Prospect School in Hempstead, one of the oldest schools in one of the poorest districts on Long Island, would not open for classes this year.
Working parents scrambled and irate citizens fumed but rather than expose kids to falling bricks and the hazards of mold and rat infestation, the school district had decided at the last moment to re-assign 400 kids from Prospect to Hempstead's other, already-overcrowded elementary schools. Officials said they had no choice because there was no money to fix the old building.
And here is what the state education department's spokesman, Tom Dunn, said last week about that: "It is their building. They own it ... This is a local matter."
In fact, of course, education is not exclusively a local matter. It's primarily the state's constitutional responsibility. Even Pataki's "Eighth Grade" Education Department admitted as much by arguing for those trade-school standards. What the spokesman really meant to say was, "This is a local matter ... until the courts force us to meet our constitutional responsibility ... "
That's exactly what the above-mentioned Court of Appeals ruling did - it ordered the state to meet its obligations, a task that is likely to cost billions, which is a whole other story.
Unfortunately for Hempstead and other low-income areas around the state, the ruling only applied to New York City school children.
The case was brought in 1993 by a public advocacy group, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, claiming that city kids were being short-changed by the state's school aid formula. The suit alleged that New York was reneging on its constitutional duty to guarantee children a decent education - the claim to which the state replied, bizarrely, that eighth grade was enough.
For reasons complicated and probably political, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decided to limit its arguments to the case for the kids of New York City. That the same case could be made for many kids in Hempstead, Roosevelt, Wyandanch, Rochester and Buffalo - where poverty, old buildings, lack of computers, lack of parent participation, high faculty and administrative turnover, outdated textbooks, overcrowded classrooms, all denied children the opportunity to a decent education, too - was apparently considered more than one lawsuit could handle.
(Thus, the spokesman's phrase, "a local matter" - referring to a suburban school rather than a city school - stings with the precision of a kind of lizardy lawyer-ese accuracy.)
So, in 2001, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed its own lawsuit on behalf of just those kids.
"An accident of birth - whether in Hempstead or Huntington, Roosevelt or Rockville Centre, Wyandanch or Woodbury - should not determine who gets an adequate education and who doesn't," said the suit, describing polarities of Long Island's particular economic landscape. "Students consigned by poverty or residence to failing schools have no alternative. They are too poor to move to districts with better schools and are essentially a captive audience."
Donald Shaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney handling the case, said it was dismissed last year in Manhattan Supreme Court, based largely on the then-still-standing "eighth grade" ruling of the Appellate Division.
With that ruling overturned in June, it's likely the case will be reinstated on appeal, he said.
Until then - and far beyond, because these cases tend to take years - Long Island's poorest neighborhoods will get the Eighth-Grade treatment from Gov. Pataki's state education department, unless their buildings fall down around them first.
— Paul Vitello
Not Making the Grade
Newsday
2003-09-07
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-livit073444608sep07,0,5805150.column?coll=ny-news-columnists
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