From the Publisher

Freeport Schools Forget The Jews • Who's Next?

by Stewart S Lilker

After years of insensitivity, wastefulness, insults, misinformation, arrogance, rudeness, civil rights violations, cover-ups, theft, outright lies and the wholesale destruction of a school system and the young lives and the future of the innocent, the brain trust of the Freeport School District has outdone itself. Every time you think they can’t, they "just do it." Aided by the NYS Education Department and Commissioner Mills himself, the district sinks lower and lower, so low that it just doesn’t have to think any more. But I get ahead of myself.

The dedicated administrators, teachers and maintenance workers, the nuts and bolts, the heart and soul of the system itself, are dwindling like the days of winter are now. Sure, there are some good ones left, but in a district where lies are dispersed like candy, where the truth has taken a back seat to the careers and the political connections of school board members and administrators alike, for the most part, it is only the exuberant inexperienced that are attracted to this district now. Every once in a while the district gets lucky and like a shooting star falling out of the heavens, a bright light finds a home here. Most in the know, know who they are. How long they will stay? Well, it’s the old saying, easy come -- easy go.

Freeport is a school district that has lost its way. It is lost in the fog with no moral compass and for the past decade has been rewriting in earnest, its chapters in its version of the classic fable, the Emperor and His New Clothes.

Freeport’s record is distinguished. Stealing from the state was so easy the district falsified over a half a million hours in student time cards in the district’s ESL program before they got caught. Nobody got busted for that one, because the Superintendent’s daddy was the President of Grumman. It was easy to cover-up those shenanigans. A NYS Senator and his crack aid, a former Freeport School Board member, arranged for the School Board to meet secretly out of town and arranged for the NYS legislature to pass legislation, outlining the district’s payback terms, without anyone in Freeport the wiser. The school auditors, Enron style, were even in on it, claiming, "In the previous fiscal year some problems were discovered ..."

For the past decade, under every rock there has been a scandal waiting to slither out. The falsification of test scores in the Junior High School, no problem. We won’t tell anybody. The evening Community School, a school for the misbehaved and the underachievers, took over where the ESL program left off, no problem. The NY State Education Department (NYSED) covered up that one because they didn’t want to make themselves look bad. The jacking of the school report card test scores, no problem. The NYSED let the superintendent investigate herself. Now there is something that makes sense. Shenanigans in the summer school driver’s Ed program, no problem. Putting the head school psychologist’s office in the bathroom, no problem. An air circulating system in the Jr. High School that was making staff and children sick for over twenty years, no problem. Secret school board meetings with the village’s mob/village attorney, no problem. Illegal pro school bond messages by the village’s mayor put in the district’s offices, no problem. Student’s smoking dope on school property while the high school principal looked on, no problem. The same high school principal establishing a Senator Joe McCarthy hit list, as Freeport’s NYS Senator looked on and did nothing, no problem. A school board member stealing campaign literature off car windshields, no problem. A school board member soliciting business for his firm, no problem. Past and present school board members and administrators having to defend themselves in Federal Court for Civil Rights violations, no problem.

So, what’s the problem when everything that goes on in the land of Oz is "no problem?" Hang in there, we’re getting close.

The district closed a public school, rather than bus white children into a school that was just feet from a public housing project. A couple of years ago, when the district had a chance to buy back the school, for a fraction of what it would have cost to build a new one, history repeated itself when they decided to build a new one, instead of buying back the old one. No problem.

The district, in cahoots with the village’s mayor and an impotent police chief, denied any gang activity in the schools, while the high school was infested with gang members and the district was applying for grant money with the justification that the Freeport Police claimed that an overwhelming number of the Latino school population were gang members or involved in gang activity. Finally, the district and the village established a secret gang task force. No problem, in the land of Oz, nobody has to know what is going on.

So what’s the problem? We’re getting close.

As the flag waves on their Web Site, the School Board and the District Clerk fabricate board minutes falsely claiming that they recite the pledge of allegiance before the meetings are gaveled to order, when all they do is drink coffee and exchange small talk. No problem. The Commissioner of Education, Richard Mills, calls this "administrative error" in Freeport.

The years of lies, fabrication, and incompetence have finally taken their toll on the district, rotting its leadership’s collective brain cells, just as surely as if they mainlined crack for a decade.

So what did they do now? They forgot. They forgot that there was once a thriving Jewish population in Freeport. The district’s amnesia began at Christmas, when they forgot to put Hanukah on the district Web Site along with Xmas. It took somebody a week to recognize this oversight.

Now, they have forgotten the Jews again. Until today, they have left Passover off the District’s Web Site, while listing Palm Sunday. For the first time ever, the district scheduled a school board meeting on the first night of Passover. Rather than advise the district on their web site of the error, they choose to do nothing. Then, on Monday morning, they posted the evening’s school board meeting announcing the meeting on the first night of Passover, when they apparently knew a month ago that the meeting had been rescheduled. Why? Because they "just do it." Because this is a district which has been run on auto pilot for so long, without a conscience, without a mission, and without any compelling need to be sensitive to the needs of the community or the children it serves, there is no reason to change.

The district forgot about the majority of its children a long time ago. Now they forgot about the Jews. Why? Because they could. Who’s next?