Newsday on SD15 Conflict

Newsday puts up an article on the School District 15 death threats of quite some time ago. Certainly not the most timely of news, but a very reasonable article on the matter:

Teach the children well? Not this
The crowd went wild as the Lawrence Golden Tornadoes football team scored one of the biggest upsets in the 15-year history of the Long Island Championships nine days ago.

The team, in its ninth straight win this season, came out of nowhere on the last Sunday in November to become the best on Long Island.

And that's exactly where the district, and the community of Lawrence, want to be.

For some, the team's achievement balanced out some of the bad - no, make that shocking - news that roiled the community for most of the same month.

On Nov. 8, school board president Asher Mansdorf and three board members received death threats, according to Nassau County police. The message was clear: Close another public school in the district and you will die.

Whoa.

This is the kind of venom spewed by dunderheads during the long, bitter fight over school integration.

In Lawrence, tensions have been brewing for years. But religion, rather than race, has become the community's central and divisive theme.

District 15 now has more children attending private religious schools than public ones.

Those whose children go private want Lawrence's public schools to accept the new reality, and shrink accordingly.

Those whose children go public want to protect what they have, fearing that any movement to shrink is, in reality, a movement to abolish public schools.

That's the shorthand version of the dynamic between the Orthodox Jewish community and just about everybody else in Lawrence.

But now the ongoing tension has devolved into death threats. That's a low.

The threats were timely, since the district closed one of its elementary schools and the board - now with an Orthodox majority - recently directed superintendent John Fitzsimons to report on the possibility of closing another.

A letter went to Mansdorf's home and business, threatening him, his children and grandchildren. I could not reach Mansdorf yesterday, but he has told local newspapers that police asked him not to talk about the incident.

Police are investigating the incident as a misdemeanor case of aggravated harassment, officials said yesterday. They've sent evidence to the lab to find fingerprints or other potential clues.

"It's troubling," said school superintendent Fitzsimons, "but it's not the focus of what is going on here."

Maybe it should be.

Anyone who sends missives, anonymous or otherwise, threatening adults, children and grandchildren is wrong. But this is about more than some dunderhead.

Lawrence is a fast-changing community in desperate need of common ground. But to get it, both sides will have to bend. And that does not seem to be happening.

As a result of the threats, a uniformed police officer is slated to be posted at school board meetings.

Is this, along with other protective measures, what the community really wants? Is it the only way to navigate the district's challenges?

"People of good will need to find some way to build bridges, but it seems not to be happening," Fitzsimons said. "What message are we sending our children?"

This article gets it exactly right. The fact that the private school community is quite correctly rallying around calls for fiscal responsibility in response to a quickly dwindling public school enrollment does not in any way justify the response of death threats. The fact that the public school community has the unfounded and quite paranoid fear that, as the article puts it, "any movement to shrink is, in reality, a movement to abolish public schools" is simply not grounds for the heights of discord and disharmony that this community has reached. And I expected to see loud and strident condemnations of the threats on the part of the public school community, or at least their leadership. That might have been wishful thinking.

And not only did we not hear any sort of concerted effort to condemn the threats, I particularly don't like the way district superintendent Dr. Fitzimons attempts to brush off/play down the horrifying nature of the threats by saying that "it's not the focus of what is going on here". Well, as the article states, "Maybe it should be".

Maybe it should be.

When we've reached the point of threats to a board members family, I think we can all agree that the rancor is way over the top.

Enough with the madness. Closing schools is not equal to killing family members - or threatening to do so. Where is the community leadership? Why are they not trying to ratchet down the fury? Hello? Anyone?