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Fighting for School Dollars

Levittown leads an 8-year court struggle but fails to overturn state's funding policy

By Jerry Markon | Staff Writer

It was a basic premise of suburbia: the right to a good education in a neighborhood school. And few communities prized their schools more than Levittown.

In the boom years of the 1950s and '60s, enrollment soared in America's quintessential suburb. Programs expanded. "The school district was our identity," says Levittown resident and former PTA leader Clare Worthing.

But as the growth stopped and the economy slipped, Levittown found itself in a financial squeeze, lacking the wealth to pay for the education residents had come to expect. So the district went to court in 1974, leading 27 of New York's less wealthy communities in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state's method of relying on local property taxes to finance education.

The case would last eight years and involve 23,000 pages of testimony. In the end, the schools would lose, and subsequent efforts to alter the wealth disparities among Long Island's 125 districts would fail. Today, the "Levittown case" is barely a footnote in the history of national school reform. Yet it endures in importance locally. It raised issues of taxation and fairness in education still fiercely debated -- and galvanized Long Island school districts into a potent lobbying force for change.

Above all, the case served as a symbolic end to the era of plenty for Long Island schools, a painful transition from unparalleled growth to the modern age of aging buildings, budget battles and shrinking dollars to fund rising academic standards.

Those struggles were unthinkable in the halcyon days, when the masses migrated to Long Island, bringing along their high expectations for schools. "They wanted their children's lives to be better than theirs, and the key was education," said Lorraine Deller, a former president of the Nassau-Suffolk School Board Association who moved to Baldwin in 1964.

Levittown's school enrollment peaked about 1968, then started declining, which meant reduced state aid. Then, in 1973, a national recession hit Long Island hard -- and in districts like Levittown, state mandates for everything from special education to energy-efficient boilers drained resources.

As they wrestled with tightening budgets, Levittown administrators found that the district's lack of industry and relatively low property wealth meant that they couldn't raise as much money as richer districts could. Levittown was forced to increase class sizes and cut back on electives and supplies.

"We just didn't have any money," recalled Robert Neidich, Levittown's superintendent at the time. "I thought our only hope was to change the system."

By the mid-1970s, the timing seemed right. Several lawsuits had been filed in other states seeking to change education financing, and a landmark 1971 ruling in California had declared that state's system of funding schools through property taxes unconstitutional.

The California case galvanized a national school equity reform movement, fueled by the social activism of the times. "The whole equity spirit started with the civil rights movement, the Great Society," said Margaret Goertz, a school finance expert and education professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Neidich picked up the telephone in 1974, and within days, he had rounded up support from 26 other property-poor suburban and rural districts, including 12 on Long Island ranging from Brentwood to Roosevelt.

"He was a dynamo, the principal actor," said Daniel Levitt, who represented the districts in the lawsuit they filed in 1974 in State Supreme Court in Mineola. The plaintiffs were later joined by the Cities of New York, Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse, which argued that since their resources had to finance everything from police to firefighters, there was not enough left for education.

During the eight-month trial, the suburban and rural districts argued that the state formula enacted in 1925 was unconstitutional because it relied too heavily on property taxes and tied education to property wealth. They urged a fairer distribution of funds, though they didn't make any specific proposals.

Attorneys for the state countered that the current system met the requirements of New York's constitution -- that children be given a free, basic education. Only the Legislature could make changes, they argued, and the state could not afford the money for reform.

In 1978, Justice L. Kingsley Smith backed the Levittown forces, ruling that the state's funding system was unconstitutional because it favored property-rich districts. The Appellate Division upheld the ruling.

But the State Court of Appeals in 1982 ruled against the school districts. Though it found "significant inequalities" in school financing, it agreed with the state's arguments and upheld the current system. The loss shocked those arguing for change.

"Most people were surprised at how the Court of Appeals chickened out," said Levitt, a Manhattan lawyer. "This system is crazy."

His opposing counsel, Amy Herz Juviler, sounded ready to re-argue a case that she said "lasted so long it was like being in prison." While the system may have inequalities, she said, they should be debated in the Legislature, not the courts. "The school districts were 100 percent wrong," said Juviler, who retired in 1993 as a New York City criminal court judge.

In the last decade the Legislature has adjusted the school-aid formula to provide some additional money to low-wealth districts, but it hasn't satisfied these districts. A subsequent suit filed by low-wealth Long Island districts was thrown out in 1995, and the system is still riddled with disparities and heavily dependent on property taxes. New York State pays about 40 percent of school costs; the national average is 49 percent. Meanwhile, about 20 other states have been ordered by courts to replace systems similar to New York's in the past two decades. Those states have generally spent more on low-wealth districts, with a few restricting spending of wealthier districts.

Today, Levittown schools still face large classes and limits on supplies and extracurricular activities. Superintendent Herman Sirois says the old lawsuit gave the district an unfair "stigma" as poor; it did not participate in the second suit.

But Sirois said he understands what his predecessors felt compelled to do. "They were honor-bound to carry a banner for the needs of their citizens," he said. "At some point, even if you're crying into the night, you have to speak out."