Crossing the Line? : A school for disabled Hasidic children has some worried about separation of church and state.

Sarah Danzinger gave birth to 17 “perfect” children, as she likes to point out. Then 10 months ago, she had a sweet-faced baby named Barry, who was born with Down’s syndrome.

“There was nowhere to turn,” says the 42-year-old mother who mainly speaks Yiddish. “But then I thought of our school, I mean our public school, and I thought, there is someone to help!”

Barry attends a toddler program in a school so unique and so controversial that the United States Supreme Court is scheduled to decide this spring whether to keep it open.

Already, the highest court of New York has tried to close it. Now it is up to the nine justices to examine the school’s creation, and through this case to confront one of the thorniest of constitutional disputes: how far should government go in trying to accommodate religious needs?

Danzinger is a member of a Jewish sect that settled in this enclave about an hour’s drive north of New York City in the mid-1970s. After years of feuding with their secular neighbors, the Satmar Hasidim finally wore them down--as well as Gov. Mario Cuomo. Kiryas Joel was allowed to secede from the area’s Monroe-Woodbury Central School District. The idea was to get special education classes financed with tax dollars and, at the same time, shelter the children from the outside world.

Children like Barry Danzinger cannot function at the ultra-Orthodox private Jewish day schools where almost every other village child studies.

Sarah Danzinger says she feared that her son, already different because of Down’s syndrome, would have been taunted for his religious differences if he attended the public school’s special education program.

“I wouldn’t have gone to the regular public school because I would have felt like ‘Who are you? You don’t belong here,’ ” Sarah Danzinger says. “Here, I feel I belong.”

But since the day the modern brick school opened three years ago, three levels of state courts have been threatening to close it. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider whether keeping it open violates the constitutional boundary between church and state.

If the court rules against Kiryas Joel, it would nullify the school district and wipe out its public funding. This year’s budget was $3.2 million--all but one-quarter raised through local taxes; the rest came from state aid.

In all the wranglings that led this case to the high court, there is only one point of agreement: The disabled children of Kiryas Joel have a right to the public education they are getting. And nobody is unhappy that these children are benefiting.

Through early intervention, Barry Danzinger has learned to wave “bye-bye”; one-on-one teacher attention has enabled a 5-year-old boy with cerebral palsy to point to his nose when his teacher says “nose”; individually designed programs for students with a range of learning disabilities have allowed them to advance.

No, it is not the quality of education that is at the heart of this dispute.

Rather, it is the school district’s very existence and that it is anchored by a relatively small group of children--essentially 13 full-time disabled children who are all Hasidic Jews from Kiryas Joel. (The rest of the 238 students are either Hasidic children from outside Kiryas Joel or are part-time.)

“We don’t want to get into a fight with a group of nice people who want to serve their kids,” says Louis Grumet, executive director of the New York School Board Assn., one of the main opponents to the district. “But in order to serve them, you need not have the state of New York establish a separate school district because one religious group does not want to mix with the rest of the world. It’s a frightening precedent.”

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Just by driving through Kiryas Joel, it becomes clear that this is not a typical sleepy old village in the lower Hudson Valley.

Practically all the homes are new and look alike--attached two-story houses with four steps to the front door and fencing in the front yard. Men wearing beards, broad-brimmed hats and long black coats walk the winding roads; women, dressed fashionably and with their hair covered with wigs or scarves, push baby carriages; at the Kosher supermarket, the banter is most often in Yiddish. There is construction everywhere, including a large brick building that is to be the largest mikvah (ritual bath) in the world.

In the early 1970s, about 25 Satmar families seeking to escape the urban decay of Brooklyn settled on this hilltop area of Orange County. They wanted to be left alone to live according to their customs and ultra-orthodox religious beliefs. Their leader, Rabbi Joel Teitlebaum, a revered figure who led tens of thousands of Satmars from Nazi-occupied Hungary during the World War II, led them on this last journey. He died in 1979 but not before seeing Kiryas Joel--named for him--incorporated.

The new municipality grew rapidly, mostly because Hasidic families tend to be large: eight to 10 children is common, although many families, like Sarah Danzinger’s, have as many as 18. Today, Kiryas Joel has 12,000 residents, half of whom are younger than 13 1/2 years.

The one-square-mile village has 5,000 students in its parochial schools; by comparison, the local public school district has the same number of students from a 100-square-mile area.

As the village expanded in the early 1980s, so did its problems with Monroe-Woodbury schools.

First, there was the controversy over bus drivers.

Although Kiryas Joel’s private schools receive no government funding, the state must provide transportation, as it does for the other private schools. (This is an example of how government already takes account of religious needs.)

But when female bus drivers were assigned to transport male Hasidic students, their parents protested. Under Orthodox Jewish law, as interpreted by Hasidic rabbis, men are prohibited from being in close contact with unrelated women and may not look upon any woman who is immodestly dressed. The public school district tried to help the Hasidic parents by assigning men to drive, but the bus drivers’ union didn’t like the arrangement, claiming that it discriminated against 85% of the drivers who were women. So some of the Kiryas Joel private schools stopped getting school buses.

At the same time, the village was going through a series of battles with the Monroe-Woodbury district over special education students.

“I think we always tried to offer the Hasidic children an appropriate education,” says Terrence Olivo, Monroe-Woodbury superintendent. “But the difficulty was always that parents felt our programs were not comported in such a way that was acceptable to them.”

The Hasidic parents recite the stories: There was the McDonald’s incident when a Hasidic child went on a class trip and ate non-Kosher food; there was the time a Hasidic child’s sidelocks were cut off by another student--an act not uncommon among feuding Hasidic factions; there are the holidays, from Christmas to Valentine’s Day, that Hasidic parents simply don’t want their children exposed to.

Olivo insists that the incidents of conflict have grown as Hasidic parents try to remember them; he also notes that the number of Hasidic students who attended public schools was relatively small. “I don’t think we ever had more than five or six kids,” he says.

But neither the number of students nor number of affronts matter to Abraham Weider, president of the Kiryas Joel’s School Board.

No Hasidic child, he says, should be put through a hazing or be alone in a world so alien. When Weider took his daughter, who has a hearing problem, for an evaluation at the public school, he was laughed at by some passing teen-agers.

Weider says the community tried to a “limited degree” to do something for the disabled children in its Jewish day schools. But because of the enormous cost of hiring special education teachers, it was impossible.

“They’re almost like doctors and lawyers,” says Weider, who is one of the largest benefactors to the parochial schools. Weider owns a local company that wires U.S. submarines.

Eventually, the public school set up a special education class in an annex to a Kiryas Joel parochial school. But in an unrelated 1985 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court nixed the widespread practice of public school teachers working in private schools as unconstitutional, and the Kiryas Joel annex was closed.

A lower state court suggested that Monroe-Woodbury try to find a way to educate these children at a neutral site. But Olivo says that wasn’t tenable.

“We felt it simply wasn’t appropriate to single out a segment of the community and provide special services,” he says. “We wouldn’t do it.”

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The state of New York hadn’t created a school district in more than 25 years. In fact, the trend is quite the opposite--to consolidate rather than expand.

But that didn’t deter the parents of Kiryas Joel.

“I am a religious person, so I think God gave me one child with a hearing problem to look after other (disabled) children,” says Weider, explaining his aggressive pursuit of a public school district.

Indeed, the Hasidic community used its political clout in Albany, and on the last day of the 1989 session, the state Legislature passed a bill creating the Kiryas Joel Village Union Free School District. The legislation was supported by Monroe-Woodbury school officials, who sent a letter to the governor urging him to support the bill because “it will serve to reduce community tension and lead to productive relationships.”

The bill, approved at 5 in the morning, took Grumet and even the state Department of Education--which did not support it--by surprise:

“We woke up the next morning to discover it had passed, and that the state was sending a new message: Any group of highly religious people that wants public funding but doesn’t want to mix with the rest of society can have its own district. No problem,” says Grumet, of the New York School Board Assn.

But Kiryas Joel’s attorneys have insisted that this wasn’t about religion. They simply wanted the district established to avoid the “psychological trauma” that was unavoidable if the Hasidic children had to attend schools where they were culturally different. The distinction between cultural and religious reasons was always emphasized.

Yet when he signed the bill, Cuomo signaled his concern, warning that the new school district must take pains “to avoid conduct that violates the separation of church and state because then a constitutional problem would arise.”

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Steven Benardo has heeded the governor’s warning every day he has worked in Kiryas Joel.

“I don’t do much without checking with our attorneys,” says Benardo, the Kiryas Joel school superintendent.

Benardo was head of the public special education program for the Bronx for 30,000 students when he was hired in 1990. He created a school district in three short summer months, Under makeshift circumstances, he did everything from writing a curriculum to buying desks and having a classroom building erected in six weeks.

He also recruited a staff with expertise in special education and ability in English, Yiddish and Hebrew.

That first summer, the state Department of Education trained seven people who planned to run for school board. “They were,” says Benardo, “the most prestigious people in the community. And while they’re all very religious, none is ordained as a rabbi.”

But that didn’t stop the lawsuits against Kiryas Joel.

Grumet’s side argued that the district was by its very nature unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

This ideal of not organizing governments along religious lines is important enough to the majority of the Jewish community that the American Jewish Committee and American Jewish Congress--both liberal groups--are joining the case against Kiryas Joel.

“We believe this school district is dangerous not because kids are getting help but because of what it says about public education,” says Marc Stern, the attorney for the American Jewish Congress. “This country was built on the idea of not ‘your’ public school nor ‘my’ public school but of a common school. What this suggests is that it is acceptable to carve out schools unique to religious groups. In effect, you have religious segregation. It doesn’t take a lot to think about what that would lead to.”

Although the court disputes have kept Benardo alert about such constitutional ideals, he has had an even greater and perhaps more rewarding challenge persuading Hasidic parents to believe in any form of public education--even a brand totally controlled by their community.

“Many worried that we were an irreligious assault on their community,” says Benardo, who commutes every day from the Bronx. “We convinced them otherwise.”

But slowly.

Resistance has been falling as enrollment in the Kiryas Joel school district has climbed from 30 students that first year to 238 this year.

Before the creation of the public school, disabled children were “trapped in the house,” says Kiryas Joel’s Weider, adding: “Now those parents are liberated and the children are like newborns. They became actual members of society.”

Ironically, though, in a community where there is no television nor other distractions from the non-Hasidic world, the public school dispute has opened a window and invited in outsiders. Every court decision has brought droves of reporters and curiosity-seekers into the village. Earlier this month when the Supreme Court decided to hear the case, helicopters carrying TV camera crews swooped into the area. And when the Supreme Court rules this spring, either way it goes, Benardo expects another charge of the reporter brigade.

“You can expect the nightly news broadcast from here,” Benardo predicts.

While the secular world of Supreme Court watchers may be making predictions--it’s expected to be a 5-4 ruling either way--Weider has a higher source:

“I have a divine inner feeling,” says Weider with a smile. “We are going to win this case.”

And if they don’t?

“It’s almost unimaginable,” Weider says. “We will try to keep the school going as much as possible. But we know it is almost impossible to raise that type of money.”