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In District Known for Failure, Will the State Finally Step In?

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By Kate Taylor

Feb. 1, 2018

When it comes to educational dysfunction, the Hempstead school district in Nassau County on Long Island is in a class by itself.

For almost 30 years, the district has been failing its students, most of whom are Hispanic and black. During most of that time, a badly divided school board has been at war with itself. Test scores and graduation rates have been among the lowest in the state. School buildings have deteriorated so much that they have closed while children went to school in trailers. And board members have been convicted of theft and fraud.

Still, despite the decades of mismanagement, the State Department of Education has done little beyond issuing threats. Now, amid a new round of infighting and charges of corruption, the education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, has given the district until Friday to submit a plan for how it will turn itself around. But if the board does not come through with a substantive plan, or does not appear prepared to implement it, it is unclear what steps she and the Legislature are prepared to take.

“It’s a zoo,” said Roger Tilles, who represents Long Island on the State Board of Regents. “I’ve been following it for 13 years and it has not gotten any better.”

The years of failure in Hempstead show how difficult it can be to effect real educational change given the constraints of local school control and the racial and socioeconomic segregation that compounds challenges.

Hempstead has close to 8,000 students. Seventy percent are Hispanic, and many of those are recent immigrants. Nearly 40 percent of students are not proficient in English, and 70 percent come from families who are on some form of public assistance.

Any district with these demographics would face challenges, but Hempstead is unusually troubled. Power on the school board swings back and forth between different factions, whose main interest, according to outside observers, is patronage. Board officials and employees have faced criminal charges — from a board member who stole a principal’s A.T.M. card and withdrew $500, to a high school teacher who is accused of stealing $140,000 worth of computers. There have been accusations of corruption involving contractors and multiple charges of fraud or irregularities in board elections.

Everything is “about controlling jobs and controlling resources,” said Alan J. Singer, a professor of education at Hofstra University. “As a result, all the factions seem to be sacrificing the needs of students.”

Recent months have seen a typical level of turmoil in the district’s leadership, as board members have battled over allegations of campaign improprieties in last May’s election, which led to a shift of power on the board.

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Shortly before the election, the old majority had voted 3 to 2 to hire a new superintendent on a four-year contract. Under the previous superintendent, a state audit found that the high school had a longstanding practice of improperly boosting students’ grades from failing to passing to improve the district’s statistics. The new superintendent was Shimon Waronker, a former army intelligence officer who had started several schools in New York City and was a favorite of the former city schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein.

Dr. Waronker, who has a doctorate in education from Harvard, quickly brought in some of his former associates from New York City. At his urging, the outgoing majority on the board entered into a $450,000 contract with a Brooklyn-based nonprofit he founded, the New American Initiative, and approved the hiring of four master teachers, whose job, Dr. Waronker said in an interview, was to implement “teacher rounds,” a form of collaborative professional development modeled on medical rounds.

Dr. Waronker denied tenure to the principal of Hempstead High School, Stephen Strachan, accusing him of failing to report weapons confiscated at the school and of keeping some weapons in his office. He later said Mr. Strachan claimed a doctorate from what Dr. Waronker called a “diploma mill.”

As soon as the new faction took power, it put the brakes on Dr. Waronker’s agenda, firing the master teachers and canceling the contract with his nonprofit. It also fired a law firm that Dr. Waronker said was investigating possible corruption in the food service program and rehired two other law firms that an external audit had found to have charged exorbitant fees. It reinstated Mr. Strachan, who in an interview said he was “not aware of there being any truth” to Dr. Waronker’s accusations.

Over just a few days in January, Dr. Waronker posted a letter on the district’s website, accusing the board majority of stymieing his effort to transform the district and of “patronage, vendettas, threats and cover-ups.” The State Education Department released a scathing report prepared by a retired superintendent, detailing the district’s record of dismal results and questionable spending, and effectively criticizing both the board and Dr. Waronker. And, the next night, in a raucous meeting, the board majority voted to put Dr. Waronker on leave and ban him from school property.

Dr. Waronker has now sued the district and the board in federal court, seeking to be reinstated.

In an interview, Dr. Waronker said he believed the school board majority had removed him because he was uncovering evidence of corruption, which he said he could not describe because he had passed it on to law enforcement. (The Nassau County district attorney’s office declined to comment.)

He said that, just as he was driving into the high school on Dec. 7 for a school board meeting, someone had fired several gunshots into a building on the corner, and that around the same time, nearby, someone had fired into a car parked outside his lawyer’s office.

“They follow you over there; they track your movements — not to sound paranoid,” he said.

But he said that he would not back down. “I’m willing to risk my life for the kids,” he said, adding, “Most people there in the district are terrified.”

The state has only ever once taken over a district completely, when in 2002 it took control of the Roosevelt School District, a nearby district with similar demographics to Hempstead. Like Hempstead, Roosevelt’s schools were low-performing and dangerous, and the leadership was chaotic. In addition, partly because the district lacked almost any commercial tax base, Roosevelt had very little money.

The state’s takeover lasted 11 years and is not generally regarded as a success: The state spent millions of dollars; some of the leaders it appointed were problematic; and the district’s results improved only marginally.

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Hempstead and Roosevelt are among the poorest and most segregated districts in Nassau County. According to state records, Roosevelt did not have a single white student in the 2016-17 school year. Roughly 2 percent of Hempstead’s students were white. Nassau County’s population overall is 61 percent white, according to census records. In the district just north of Hempstead, Garden City, 88 percent of the students are white.

Dr. Singer, the Hofstra professor, said he felt the state’s decision to take over the Roosevelt district was a way for it to avoid dealing with the larger segregation issue.

In interviews, parents and students in the Hempstead district expressed distress about the schools, in particular the violence at the district’s middle and high schools. According to the report prepared for the state by the retired superintendent, Jack Bierwirth, there were more than 50 fights at the high school between September and early December.

“It disrupts me from learning in class,” said Tamia Grant, 17, a senior at the high school. She said she hears the students fighting right outside her classrooms. “The doors are so thin, they’re like plexiglass, and they knock into the door,” she said. "My teacher has to stop what she’s doing to lock the door, because we’re scared that they’ll come into our classroom.”

Several Hispanic parents said that they felt that Hispanic students and families were particularly marginalized. They said that there were no Spanish interpreters at school meetings or at parent-teacher conferences.

“I always go to my kids’ meetings, but they say there’s no one there that speaks Spanish, so I don’t understand what they say to me,” said Emily Flores, 40, an immigrant from Mexico who has two children at Hempstead High School. Ms. Flores spoke in Spanish through an interpreter.

In 2015, an investigation by the state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, found that the district had denied or delayed the enrollment of dozens of Hispanic students, many of them unaccompanied minors from Central and South America. In some cases, the district told students or their guardians that there was no room for them in the schools and put them on a “wait list,” which eventually had 60 students on it.

Dr. Waronker, who grew up in South America and speaks fluent Spanish, had made a particular effort to connect with Hispanic families, said the Rev. Luis Miguel Romero, the pastor of Our Lady of Loretto, a local Roman Catholic church. Among other things, Father Romero said that Dr. Waronker had personally offered a course to parents at the church about how they could help in their children’s education.

Father Romero said that he was distressed by the school board’s decision to put Dr. Waronker on leave.

“It is jeopardizing the only hope that we have seen in Hempstead,” he said.

Ms. Elia, who visited the district in mid-January, said that it was too soon to say what options would be on the table if the board’s response did not prove to her that it could address the issues raised in the state report. The commissioner has the authority in some circumstances to remove individual school board members, but she would need to be empowered by the Legislature to fire and replace the whole board.

“Obviously, removing someone from elected position is not something that any agency or anyone would want to do lightly,” she said. But, she said, “I’ve made it very clear to them that we are not going to allow this district to not focus their attention on the needs of the children there.”