Rockland County, NY – Playing The Race Card, Lawsuit Says East Ramapo’s School Board Election System Favors “White Majority”

Rockland County, NY – After years of finding itself the subject of criticism amidst accusations that its board unfairly favors private school students over their public school counterparts, the East Ramapo Central School District once again finds itself in the spotlight after being slapped with a lawsuit alleging that its school board election system discriminates against students of color and other minorities.

A group of seven East Ramapo parents have joined with the Spring Valley branch of the NAACP in the lawsuit which charges both the school district and New York State Department of Education Commissioner Maryellen Elia with denying the district’s minority citizens of their right to be fairly represented on the school board.

According to the lawsuit, the current at-large system that has school board candidates elected by voters in the entire district instead of specific geographical areas within the district, has prevented candidates favored by minority residents from winning seats on the board.

According to the lawsuit, the failure of seven black and Latino plaintiffs to see their chosen candidates win any election in the last ten years because of “the electoral strength of a White majority,” is a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which bans any possible discrimination in the voting process based on race or color.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union charged the school district with diverting taxpayer funds to bankroll white private schools, an action that she said has compromised the education of thousands of minority children.

“The East Ramapo school district has effectively disenfranchised the black and Latino community and allowed white residents to hijack the school board in service of the lily-white private schools,” said Lieberman.

The lawsuit is calling for a freeze on future school board elections until the voting process is shifted from an at-large model to a nine ward system whose district lines would be drawn to give minority candidates better chances at winning a seat on the board.

Currently the East Ramapo school board consists of eight Orthodox Jewish men and one representative of the minority community, Sabrina Charles-Pierre, who was appointed to a vacant seat after a board member resigned mid-term, ultimately being elected to continue in that role two years later.

Ironically, while the lawsuit criticizes the at-large election system for allowing “the White community in East Ramapo to vote as a bloc in order to defeat Minority-preferred candidates” it draws on past patterns of African American and Latino voters supporting the same candidates as the solution to having more minority-supported school board hopefuls winning seats on the board.

A video posted to YouTube by the NYCLU blatantly plays the race card, attempting to contrast the plaintiffs’ claims to discrimination in the south decades ago, combining more than fifty year old footage with a current exterior shot of East Ramapo’s Summit Park Elementary School.

“My grandmother grew up in a small town in South Carolina called Holly Hill and she told me a story how she didn’t graduate high school and what happened was they no longer provided school bus services on the black side of town to the high school and as a result she was unable to complete her senior year of high school,” said Eric Goodwin, an East Ramapo parent and one of two plaintiffs who unsuccessfully ran for a school board seat. “She always said ‘they said we had a right to an education but they would never make it easy for us to get that education.’”

School board president Yehuda Weissmandl told The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/2myy235) that he not yet reviewed the complaint and declined to address the claims that were made therein.

Weissmandl noted that the election rules were not created by the school board and that the lawsuit would only hurt schoolchildren in the district because money needed to fight the case would have to be diverted from “district programs and opportunities.”