April 17, 2005
LONG ISLAND
The Hempstead Report

LINK

If there were any need to explain the cloud of failure hanging over the Hempstead Union Free School District, a report last week from the State Education Department provided all the details.

The report, prepared by a team of about 40 specialists who visited last December, found deficiencies in every area examined, from curriculum to safety to buildings to food. The high school and middle school in particular suffer from a miserable range of problems beyond low achievement and high dropout rates, including a shortage of resources for English and math instruction, inadequate security, deteriorating buildings, demoralized staff members, gang activity, an "open campus" policy that encourages truancy and tardiness, and Afrocentric programs blind to the reality that Hempstead's students are now mostly Hispanic.

Other evidence was literally sickening: team members examining the lunch operation found sloppy kitchens, moldy refrigerators and a staff untrained in basic sanitation and hygiene. The food service staff, the report said, operated without cost controls or oversight and used inflated meal counts to gain more government money and donated food.

The full report is available here. Anyone who cares about Long Island's children should read it.

What it depicts is not a worthy band of professionals suffering under the constraints of impossibly meager budgets - a situation shared by many other poor, minority school districts across the state - but an administration that has abdicated even the most basic duties of responsible, competent management. This should come as no surprise, given the board's embarrassing history of ineptitude and infighting, as exemplified in the last year by the firing, reinstatement and refiring of a superintendent in a deplorable clash with the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills.

What the state has now documented in Hempstead amounts to a fundamental betrayal of the public trust. The next few months will be crucial in determining once and for all whether the current board, under Superintendent Susan Johnson, has the ability or the will to improve things.

In last week's report, the Education Department recommended a monumental to-do list, from overhauling the curriculum to firing the food director. It is a daunting task, but vital to restoring hope for the school children of Hempstead, where residents are so distrustful of the school administration that in December 2003 they rejected a $177 million bond issue that would have done much to improve the schools' crumbling physical structures.

The next step for Hempstead - a state takeover - is a drastic measure rightly approached with great reluctance. But the issue deserves serious consideration in the next legislative session if, as we expect, the situation has not begun to turn around. In Hempstead, as in Roosevelt and other afflicted school districts, parents are deeply skeptical of handing things over to Albany. The issue is especially touchy in the balkanized racial climate of Long Island, where some have wondered why the criminally mismanaged (but mostly white) Roslyn schools, for example, were never a takeover target.

The reason is that Roslyn's students receive a sound, basic education, and Hempstead's do not.