NEW YORK TIMES
N.Y. / Region
Pine Bush School District Agrees to Pay $4.48 Million to Settle Anti-Semitism Suit
By BENJAMIN WEISERJUNE 29, 2015
An upstate New York school district has agreed to pay $4.48 million and enact broad reforms in curriculum and training to settle a lawsuit by five current and former Jewish students who claimed that they had been victims of pervasive anti-Semitism in the schools, a court filing on Monday shows.
The lawsuit had accused officials of the Pine Bush Central School District, which is about 90 minutes north of New York City, of failing for years to take action to protect the Jewish students from anti-Semitic bullying, slurs and other intimidation.
The students had told of finding swastikas drawn on walls, desks, lockers and other school property; of being subjected to epithets and nicknames; and of being shoved and beaten, according to depositions in the lawsuit and later interviews with The New York Times. The students also described terrifying bus rides with students leading “white power” chants and making Nazi salutes with their arms.
The agreement, which still must be approved by Judge Kenneth M. Karas, calls for the students to receive two-thirds of the $4.48 million settlement, with their lawyers receiving the rest. The deal comes two weeks before the civil rights case was to go to trial in United States District Court in White Plains.
“Anti-Semitic harassment is wrong,” the school district and the plaintiffs said in a joint statement posted Monday on the Pine Bush website. “The district will never condone anti-Semitic slurs or graffiti, Holocaust ‘jokes’ or physical violence. No family should have to experience the hurt and pain that bullying and name-calling can cause children to endure because of their religious, national or cultural identity.”
The judge will retain jurisdiction over the matter for three years to enforce the terms of the agreement, according to the settlement document, which was filed on Monday in court. Judge Karas is expected to take up the matter at a hearing on Tuesday.
The 2012 suit alleged that “deliberate indifference” by school officials had allowed the anti-Semitic harassment to persist across grade levels in three of the district’s schools. As a result, the students’ grades had suffered, and they became withdrawn and depressed, the suit said.
Pine Bush officials had vigorously fought the suit, arguing that they had responded properly by holding anti-bullying assemblies and imposing discipline where it was appropriate. The school district, located west of Newburgh, N.Y., serves about 5,600 children from Orange, Sullivan and Ulster Counties. In the 1970s, Pine Bush was the home of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter president.
The settlement calls for mandatory training for teachers and staff members on how to recognize and report anti-Semitic graffiti, name-calling, insults and other such harassment; the district must also maintain a broad anti-bullying curriculum, developed with the Anti-Defamation League.
The school district must revise its policies against discrimination and bullying to ensure that they cover and prohibit anti-Semitic harassment, and that such episodes must be “promptly and thoroughly” investigated. The district must also maintain clear records documenting complaints and the ensuing investigation, and must inform alleged victims of the results and offer them counseling.
Pine Bush would also be required to institute “meaningful, consistent, minimum consequences” for anti-Semitic harassment, and increase its severity for repeated instances. And the district must promptly photograph and remove any anti-Semitic graffiti that appears on school property.
In 2013, after The Times published an extensive article about the case and the broader issue of anti-Semitism at Pine Bush, federal and state authorities opened civil rights investigations into the allegations.
Last year, the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, filed a statement of interest in the case that said the evidence was “sufficient for a jury to find that the district failed to respond to pervasive anti-Semitic harassment in its schools” by taking action required under a civil rights law.
In November, Judge Karas denied the district’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit in the case of three plaintiffs. The judge wrote that the “uncontested facts” suggested that the harassment of the three students had begun at Pine Bush Elementary School, persisted through their time at Crispell Middle School and, for two of the plaintiffs, had continued at Pine Bush High School. (The third student had left school because of the abuse and was taught at home by her mother.)
Judge Karas, while not ruling on the merits of the case, said a jury could reasonably find that the plaintiffs had “suffered severe and discriminatory harassment, that the district had actual knowledge of the harassment, and that the district was deliberately indifferent to the harassment.”
The settlement also requires the district to seek assistance for three years from the United States Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in revising policies, training and curriculum that are part of the agreement.
“The purpose of the required reforms is simple: to ensure that no student in the district has to endure such horrific anti-Semitic or racist harassment ever again,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Ilann M. Maazel, of the firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, wrote in the court filing.