Islip Town denies Muslim group's boarding school plan over zoning issue

Islip officials who said a Muslim group could not board students at a former Catholic boarding school said the property's history does not determine its future.

Islip’s zoning board of appeals said late Tuesday the United American Muslim Association, a New Jersey-based group, could not board students at the proposed school because the proposal didn't conform to zoning rules. The vote was 3-1. Newsday obtained a copy of the panel's decision Friday.

The organization had sought to open a boarding school on the 13-acre property for 120 boys in grades 7 through 12. It bought the property for $5 million in June from the Montfort Missionaries. Until 1972, the missionary group ran the site as a boarding school for teenage boys vying to become priests.

Islip's zoning board considered the permissibility of boarding students on the property. It reversed the town's building division, which earlier said boarding "constitutes a permitted accessory use to a parochial school," the decision said.

The panel had to decide whether boarding represented an allowed "accessory use" under town code. An accessory use must be "customary," as well as "clearly incidental," and cannot include business activities, the ruling said. The proposal, the board said, failed to conform to all three criteria.

An attorney for the United American Muslim Association could not be reached for comment.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations' New York chapter told Newsday it was “reviewing the decision and will continue to monitor the situation closely.”

“We remain committed to ensuring that Muslim students, families, and institutions are afforded equal treatment and that their civil rights and religious freedoms are protected," Iman Virani, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Friday.

"I see basically that this is Islamophobia and anti-Islam discrimination. That has been happening on Long Island quite a bit," said Habeeb Ahmed, a member of the Westbury-based Islamic Center of Long Island.

Three criteria weighed

Boarding constituted a "substantial" use of the property, the zoning board found. It was not, the decision said, "subordinate and clearly incidental to the principal educational use."

Islip’s board also argued that, because less than 3% of schools in New York State have dorms, that piece of the proposal was not customary.

The board said that some housing units on campus “could be made available to individuals who were neither students nor staff of the school.” It also cited materials that “promoted a daycare” and “advertised the property for weddings.”

The board said it considered the Bay Shore property's history.

"The historical Montfort use developed under a materially different zoning scheme," the panel wrote. "The prior operation of a school with residential facilities does not establish that boarding is presently permitted as an accessory use to a parochial school."

The board pointed to a historic property in Oakdale that was cited by the Muslim organization's attorney.

In 1999, St. John's University bought the former La Salle Military Academy campus in Oakdale and received “discretionary zoning approval."

It was granted a special use permit because of the “importance of preserving the historic property and maintaining a viable institutional use of the campus," the decision said.

But the zoning board said "the history and zoning circumstances of the Oakdale property are materially different from those presented in this appeal."

By Sam Kmack

sam.kmack@newsday.com

Sam Kmack covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and previously worked as a city watchdog reporter in the Phoenix metro area, as well as an investigative journalist at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.