Isn’t it enough that the state downgrades Riverhead’s schools, yet state education law only requires our school administrators and teachers to do no more than grade themselves on how they are fixing it? Now Riverhead schools endure the first of a new one-two punch, and they’ve been taking it hard. And it’s not unique to Riverhead. A check with other North Fork school districts reveals tremors from this same first hit as well. The second hit is unique to 
Riverhead, and will be discussed in a moment. Keep in mind that political correctness discourages meaningful public discussion of either issue, but not here.
The first, ongoing hit comes from a months-long surge in “Limited English Proficient” students, and it is at a crisis stage. The other school districts on the North Fork, for their part, say little about it, and are reluctant to provide any figures.
As a general rule, not much in the way of solid information about almost anything ever comes out of the Riverhead School District or its board. A few months ago, we noted that too much of their work, both in the form of discussion and decision-making, is done in unwarranted, executive (closed to the public) sessions. On this issue, the Riverhead School District has been verbal to a degree, but according to some, the district tells only half the story.
LEP is the current, politically correct way to describe mostly illegal immigrant students. The federal government has failed abysmally to get illegal immigration under control, particularly in recent months with reckless presidential executive orders. The rational solution would be to strengthen our LEGAL immigration system, where immigrants are screened and guided into educational and training programs able to address their futures. Until that unlikely event, droves of LEP school-age children will continue to enroll in the North Fork schools on a daily basis.
1,160 LEP students now attend the Riverhead schools, mostly in the high school. With a total student enrollment in the Riverhead School District of 5,300, that means that an astonishing 22 percent of Riverhead’s student enrollment is largely made up of illegal immigrants. With a daily influx, this figure grows. Incidentally, the cost to educate a student in Riverhead each year is $21,214., a figure that itself is dated by more than three years and well above state averages.
Central to the purpose and effect of political correctness is shutting down debate. Candid, objective discussion of many critical issues, including illegal immigration, is made impossible. The very phrase, “illegal immigration,” is politically incorrect and thus taboo. Indeed, “taboo” itself is a politically incorrect term.
PC has fostered here in the US, a nation of laws, what are known as “sanctuary cities,” and “sanctuary villages,” where local government simply ignores federal immigration laws, becoming a magnet for illegal immigrants. Most illegal immigrants find “sanctuary” from deportation in sanctuary cities. Suffolk County is a sanctuary county, and political correctness has prevented virtually any discussion or public comment about. PC is the antithesis of a democratic society.
This overwhelming burden on the school districts has been met with disinterest on the federal level. The state has been likewise unresponsive, though the Riverhead school superintendent just now expressed the “hope” that state officials will “listen” to pleas for help, rather than leaving it to local communities to manage the crisis financially. So the feds and the state allow these miseries to pour downward, fully aware, and just as oblivious, of their harsh impact on all of us, including the LEP students.
Anecdotal information from several teachers in other school districts on the North Fork as well as from Riverhead is sobering, to say the least. These teachers are presented with ever-larger classroom shares of LEP students who cannot grasp what is being taught, a situation that increasingly holds back the pace of teaching for the rest of the class.
These clearly and deeply concerned teachers speak in hushed tones of how the hiring of bi-lingual teachers and non-instructional support staff is not keeping up, and the dedicated help of the non-profit community fails to fill the gap. Such faltering education on a large scale serves to create a permanent, economic underclass. Both the LEP students and the citizen students (another PC breach to say that, too) deserve far better, and could get it with some tough decision-making. We can all get out of this.
Also on the horizon for the beleaguered Riverhead School District is the second of what is earlier described as the one-two punch, this being known as the “Family Community Life Center” of Riverhead’s First Baptist Church. This otherwise fabulous, multi-use project, with child and adult care, recreational, theatre, sports and other facilities, offers much to the North Fork community to whose benefit the project is dedicated. Yet a long-term, repeating body-blow to the school district comes with the project’s planned 125 apartment units.
As a church facility, the 12-plus acre project will be property tax-exempt. The church pledges to compensate for this with voluntary payments to the school district for the scores of the Life Center’s resident children each year who will enroll in Riverhead’s schools. Such payments are not legally binding, but rather in the nature of options or preferences on the part of the church when able to do so.
Many state court as well as U.S. Supreme Court decisions, which form the case law in this situation, have stopped tax-exempt status for church-sponsored projects which are “proprietary” in nature, meaning those that are more commercial than religious in purpose.
Sure enough, politicians in our county, on our school board, even inexplicably at our town hall, ever on the side of political correctness, support the project and its required zone-change. Throwing their problem-solving obligations over the side, they leave glaringly and irresponsibly unsettled this project’s financial impact on the schools, and thus on Riverhead’s private and commercial property owners and renters.
Also quick to join in support is Suffolk County’s Regional “Planning Commission,” callously unconcerned with the jolting, fiscal shock upon our community. The county is no more prudent in “planning” for this than they have been with planning their “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants. And the all-powerful teachers’ union in Riverhead toes the company line regarding these alarming developments with resounding silence, effectively bailing out on their members, the students and their families, and the schools.
Perhaps the Family Community Life Center, with its present 125-apartment format, could succeed in communities which might more readily absorb such enormous tax-exempt, residential complexes. Perhaps, as well, here in our politically correct, sanctuary county, there are communities in a position to educate properly the surging numbers of illegal immigrant children without seriously impacting the overall quality or affordability of our seriously buckling classroom instruction. But if it has to be in Riverhead and elsewhere on the North Fork, then our elected officials, community leaders and activists have much more work to do, rather than simply take the easy, and politically correct, way out.
Greg Blass has spent his life in public service since he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a teenager. He has worked in the private sector as an attorney and served six terms representing the East End in the Suffolk County Legislature, where he was also presiding officer. Greg has worked as an adjunct professor at Suffolk County Community College, as Greenport village attorney, as N.Y. State family court judge and as Suffolk County social services commissioner. Now retired, Greg is active in volunteer work and is a member of the board of directors of several charities. A resident of Jamesport, he and his wife Barbara have two grown children.
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