The process of bringing all Haredi yeshivas into compliance with New York State education standards is continuing – slowly and behind schedule.

So far, two deadlines – the deadline for schools that were found to have inadequate instruction to submit remediation plans, and the deadline for school districts to submit lists of all private schools in their areas – have been pushed back.

New York State law requires all non-public schools to provide instruction  that is “substantially equivalent” to what public schools provide. That’s to ensure that all children in the state can, among other things, read and write English, do math and receive “instruction that will prepare them for their place in society.” In recent months, at least three Haredi private schools that were found not to be substantially equivalent were given more time to plan to reach that goal.

The negative determinations came on June 30, when the NYC Department of Education sent letters to four Hasidic schools in Brooklyn – Yeshiva Bnei Shimon Yisroel of Sopron, the Yeshiva Kerem Shlomo/Bobover Yeshiva Bnei Zion, and two Chabad-Lubavitch schools, Yeshiva Ohr Menachem and Yeshiva Oholei Torah – informing them that they were found not to offer adequate secular education. Among other problems, none of these schools provided evidence that it adequately taught English-language reading and writing, according to the DOE.

The investigation into specific schools began in 2015. That’s when the organization Yaffed, which advocates for better secular education in Haredi schools, submitted complaints about 39 such schools, alleging that they offered inadequate education.

Per guidelines from the New York State Education Department, the city gave the schools with negative determinations 60 days to submit plans to reach substantial equivalence. But emails obtained by Shtetl from NYSED through the Freedom of Information Law show that at least three of those four schools have not submitted plans, and have since received extensions.

In an email sent on July 20, Avi Schick, a lawyer representing some yeshivas, asked NYSED official David Frank to give Oholei Torah a 60-day extension of the deadline to submit a plan, explaining that school is closed during the summer and the beginning of the school year is busy.

“Granting this modest and reasonable extension request would also be an easy way for SED to signal its desire to work with and not against the yeshiva community,” Schick wrote.

NYSED gave Oholei Torah a 35-day extension, until Oct. 5. The Sopron school got a significantly longer extension, until Nov. 30.

“No further extension requests will be entertained,” Frank wrote in an email to leaders of the Sopron school, adding that if the NYC DOE didn’t forward documentation of Sopron’s plan within 10 days of Nov. 30, NYSED would consider commencing a penalty proceeding.

The Bobov school got a different kind of extension.

When city government officials visited the Bobov school in May 2019, they “did not observe any instruction, taught in English, in the core academic subjects of English, history, mathematics, and science,” according to the letter the DOE sent on June 30. Months later, an unnamed representative of PEARLS, an organization that advocates for Haredi private schools to dictate their own curricula, emailed the city claiming that the school no longer existed. But government officials questioned whether Yeshiva Kerem Shlomo and Bobover Yeshiva Bnei Zion, the name of the school that is now at that address, educating the same community in the same building, were actually two different schools.

That question still has not been answered. According to an email Frank sent on Sept. 28, Yeshiva Kerem Shlomo “declined to work collaboratively to create a timeline and plan for attaining substantial equivalency and, instead, has reiterated that the school has closed without anyone providing the requested evidence.” 

The state asked school leaders to submit evidence by Nov. 30 that Yeshiva Kerem Shlomo and Yeshiva Bobover Bnei Zion are two different schools. 

Meanwhile, three local school authorities in areas with many Haredi private schools belatedly gave NYSED lists of all the private schools in their geographical boundaries – over a month after the original deadline. The lists were the first step in a process, outlined in NYSED guidelines, for improving secular education in all private schools, not just the ones that the NYC DOE investigated. In other words, it’s impossible for the state to help improve education in a school if it doesn’t know that that school exists.

The NYC DOE, the Kiryas Joel school district, and the East Ramapo school district – have all submitted the lists, according to NYSED spokesperson JP O’Hare. 

The deadline for doing so was originally Sept. 1, but it was pushed to Oct. 9. At the time, O’Hare told Shtetl the change was made “to ensure the process is carried out with fidelity.” 

There are over 150,000 students in hundreds of Haredi schools in the state of New York, according to the advocacy group Teach Coalition, which is part of the Orthodox Union. By the next deadline, Dec. 1, all districts will need to show which of the NYSED-outlined pathways each private school in their area intends to use to demonstrate their substantial equivalency. The Dec. 1 deadline has not been moved, according to NYSED spokesperson Keshia Clukey.

This summer, the NYC DOE sent recommendations to the state that it make negative determinations for 14 Haredi schools, in addition to the four that it determined to be inadequate. NYSED did not immediately answer questions from Shtetl about whether the state has yet made determinations about those 14 schools.