The article doesn't make clear if students of Arabic background are the majority who attend. But making the school private is not always the best solution. Here is an example of why:

One of my employees lives up in Monroe NY (about an hour north of NYC). In her area, there is a very large population of Hasidic Jewish people. Rather than these people having to send their kids to private schools -- meaning the town would only send about half of their kids to public schools, the local school district decided a better solution would be to have 2 sets of public schools, one teaching the very religious Jewish courses, and one regular. It's not as if they need extra schools to accomplish this as the school district has enough students that it would need at least 2 high schools, 2 middle schools, etc. She said this solution has worked out very well.

On the other hand, here in Rockland County, in the East Ramapo school district, we have a similar situation (very high Hasidic Jewish population).

However, here no such solution has been implemented. So about 60% of kids attend the private Yashiva schools. As a result, whenever there is any kind of vote for the budget for the local school district, the Hasidic community mobilize the vote against the budget, and it is always voted down. The end result is that the public schools in this district have been left without the budget for anything other than reading, math, and science courses. All kinds of sports programs, arts, music, and after school programs have either been cancelled or have to do their own fund raising. When I attended high school at one of the high schools in this district about 15-20 years ago, my high school was ranked among the top 1% in New York State. Today my old high school is awful, and probably a place you would go if you wanted to buy a gun or some drugs. They no longer offer Advanced Placement courses either as any parents with gifted kids surely would not send them there.

I think keeping everything under the public school umbrella is a better idea in the long run.

__________________


my experience on X5world when I spend too much
time posting in political threads in the lounge...