A new report from New Jersey’s State Auditor says that the Lakewood Public Schools District suffers from “severe fiscal distress” and the state should create a separate funding stream to accommodate the special education and transportation costs for its swelling ultra-Orthodox community. Currently Lakewood educates 4,888 students (almost all Hispanic and poor) who attend public district schools and over 42,000 ultra-Orthodox students who attend Lakewood’s private 164 Jewish day schools, known as yeshivas.

“Lakewood school district’s nonpublic enrollment of 42,396 represented 95% of Ocean County’s nonpublic enrollment,” the report said, which was obtained by the Asbury Park Press. “From fiscal years 2014 through 2022, Lakewood school district’s nonpublic enrollment increased from 23,652 to 42,433, an overall increase of 18,781 students (79 percent). During that same period, the number of nonpublic schools increased from 88 to 164, an overall increase of 76 nonpublic schools (86 percent).”

One data point from the report jumps out at me: 33.4% of students in Lakewood are classified as eligible for special education, more than twice the state average of 15.9%. When students are classified, the district is responsible for their education costs. If district specialists decide a private religious school is the “least restrictive” environment for these students, then taxpayers fund their tuition.

Why are so many non-public school students in Lakewood diagnosed with disabilities?

I can think of two reasons.

First, fundamentalist families tend to have many children; 48% of orthodox Jewish families have four or more children, which increases the odds of disabilities: older eggs (and sperm) can lead to Down Syndrome and autism. There are also genetic mutations that run in Jewish families: I’m an Ashkenazi Jew and have the BRCA1 mutation, which significantly raises the odds of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Other genetic glitches on the “Jewish panel” can cause intellectual disabilities. 

Yet that doesn’t explain a 33.4% disability rate.

Second, let’s revisit last  December’s article in the New York Times, “How Hasidic Schools Reaped a Windfall of Special Education Funding,” on the high percentage of yeshiva students in New York City classified as having a disability. From the piece:

Dozens of schools in the Orthodox community have pushed parents to get their children diagnosed with disabilities, records and interviews show. At least two schools have sent out mass emails urging families to apply for aid. A third school provided parents with a sample prescription to give their children’s doctors, saying a diagnosis would bring more resources for the school.

Today, at Hasidic and Orthodox schools, which are called yeshivas, higher percentages of students are classified as needing special education than at other public and private schools in New York City, a Times analysis of government data found.

In one particular investigation into the Chabad Girls Academy in Crown Heights, the school sent an email to a mother telling her that her daughter could qualify for a label of autism—even though her child isn’t autistic.  The school even sent her a sample prescription for her to give to her child’s doctor: “Please can you have her medical doctor write a prescription stating diagnosis of F84.0,” the email said. “This is what we need.”  A former Hasidic preschool teacher told the Times that yeshivas “aggressively” pursue special education funding. “They just wrote down, ‘needs services,’ ‘needs services,’ ‘needs services,’” she said. “They said that everybody needed services.”

The same thing seems to be happening in Lakewood. 

NJ Education Report has extensively covered accusations by former Lakewood district staff members who have tried to shine light on the practice of skewing special education evaluations to financially benefit yeshivas, as well as ultra-Orthodox families who then don’t have to pay tuition.  For instance, supervisor Tobree Mostel sued the district when it fired her for revealing that vendors “rewarded employees for producing evaluations that said that [non-public] students needed special services.”  Another lawsuit was filed by Child Study Team supervisor Helen Tobia, who asserted that money was “being reallocated away from public school children and used to provide speech, occupational and physical therapies for non-public school students attending private schools.” (These cases were settled, with arrangements confidential.)

Does one out of three students in Lakewood really have classifiable disabilities? Or is this simply the way yeshivas do business? Ten years of fiscal monitors placed in Lakewood by the Department of Education–paid for by NJ taxpayers—has proved fruitless. (From the report: “Despite the assignment of four state monitors with total salaries of $936,667 to provide fiscal oversight, the district continues to experience fiscal issues.”)

This year state taxpayers and Lakewood residents will pay $51 million in tuition to private special education schools, the bulk of them yeshivas. Another $29 million will be spent on transportation, mostly to Jewish private schools. (NJ districts either pay busing costs for all private school students or give parents “aid in lieu of transportation,” whichever is cheaper.) 

Attorneys Paul Tractenberg and Arthur Long have filed a lawsuit against Lakewood’s inadequate state funding. A state Appellate Court found in May that the district is “severely strained” by its obligation to provide transportation and special education to thousands of non-public school students. The ruling also slammed Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan’s failure to address the district’s financial crisis. Over the last decade Lakewood has “borrowed” $135 million in loans from the state to cover budget holes and has requested another $93 million.

In addition, the Lakewood Board of Education pays its attorney Michael Inzelbuch almost $1 million a year and just raised the salary of its superintendent, Laura Winters, to $238,000 per year, with an annual 3% increase. 

Sure, New Jersey’s state funding formula doesn’t work for Lakewood. But the devil’s in the details.