http://www.newsday.com/news/local/ny-li ... 2069.story

BY MELANIE LEFKOWITZ | melanie.lefkowitz@newsday.com
11:17 PM EDT, October 14, 2007
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Digg Del.icio.us Facebook Fark Google Newsvine Reddit Yahoo Print Single page view Reprints Reader feedback Text size: Lynda D'Anna and her husband settled down in Huntington -- and even persuaded three of their siblings to do the same -- in large part because of its diversity.

"It's just a wonderful thing. I love that my kids have friends from all different backgrounds," said D'Anna, a teacher. "We live right in the village. A lot of our neighbors are young transplants from the city who chose Huntington because we're so diverse."

Many residents of the Huntington school district, where the student population is 24 percent Hispanic and 14 percent black, pride themselves on their community's range and tolerance. Galleries, ethnic restaurants and a concert hall crowd Huntington Village's compact downtown. It hosts Long Island's gay and lesbian parade. It was the first town here to have a hiring site for its growing population of Latino day laborers. Signs along its main streets still boast the title "All-American City," an honor conferred in 2002 by a national nonprofit impressed, particularly, by an event in which local youths denounced bias crimes.



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Which is why so many were shocked this summer when an outcry erupted over a proposed transfer of the high school principal. Some suggested the principal's near ouster stemmed from her efforts on behalf of Latino students. She said school board members grew angrier at her when she translated into Spanish at a board meeting." Then a second principal came forward to say she'd caught heat for doing the same kind of thing.

"It's really sad that all this stuff has come up, and it's been focused on just a few people and their feelings about the diversity," D'Anna said. "Because there are a lot of us that really take pride in that."

Sandra Cruz, whose two children attend Huntington High School, said she wasn't sure everyone in town would agree.

"I love all people -- it doesn't matter what you are. I like diversity but a lot of people don't feel the same way," Cruz said. "They don't like what's different and that's why people get targeted." The issues surrounding the debate over diversity in Huntington and one of its school districts is not unlike similar discussions taking place in communities across the country.

A diverse district

The Huntington Union Free School District stretches from rundown pockets of Huntington Station to million-dollar waterfront homes near the Sound in Huntington Bay. More than a quarter of the district's 4,200 students are eligible for free lunch, and 12 percent speak only limited English, according to state Education Department data.

"I think diversity is a strength of ours," said Superintendent John Finello. "We have a variety of programs in place to meet the needs of all of our students. We believe our graduates are well-prepared to deal with all their post-secondary experiences."

Critics say district leadership has not always been welcoming to its diverse populations. The district was ordered to desegregate in the 1970s, when the state education department upheld a parent's challenge of a redistricting that left one elementary school 28 percent minority and another more than 99 percent white. A 1992 state report criticized the district for disproportionately assigning black and Hispanic students to special education classrooms. Earlier this year, three school board members voted against a redistricting that displaced dozens of Hispanic students and hardly any white students.

"I was very disturbed when the school board adopted this plan ... because it was like a repeat performance of what has happened in the past," said Susan Levering, an attorney who unsuccessfully challenged a 1990 redistricting and whose husband, Lester Baltimore, is a former school board member. Levering said she, too, loves the town's diversity. But once she began to speak publicly about what she saw as inequities within the school district, she says she discovered a darker side.

"People were angry at me because they said, Now our property values are going to go down because people know there are immigrants in Huntington. I was like, 'Where have you been?' " she said. "There's always been people who chose to live in Huntington because it was diverse, and that's why my husband and I live here. But then there's always been people in Huntington who don't want people to know that Huntington has a large minority population."

Many of the area's minorities are concentrated in Huntington Station, two miles or more from the district's northernmost schools. Some community leaders said that if there are ethnic tensions in the school district, they stem not from racism but from anger over perceived overcrowding and illegal immigration in Huntington Station, where men congregate at the hiring site and businesses with Spanish-language signs have cropped up along Route 110.

"I honestly don't think this is about anti-Hispanic sentiment at all," said Suffolk County legislator Jon Cooper (D-Lloyd Harbor). "If there is an issue, it does relate to pressures that are being put on the schools because there's a perception at least that ... they're not paying their fair share of the taxes, and this is putting further pressure on the school district."

The district is grappling with increasing populations, class sizes and overcrowding. Assistant Superintendent Joseph Giani, who headed the committee that devised the recent redistricting, said that without action this year and a solution that will probably mean construction, some schools would not be able to accommodate rising enrollments.

Many community leaders said it is unfair to link overcrowding in the schools with Huntington Station, where some young Hispanic men -- mostly childless -- live in illegal subdivisions of single-family residences. Alan Singer, a professor of education at Hofstra University, said that even if their parents are not legal, children here tend to have been born in the United States.

"I don't think we're looking at a problem of undocumenteds, I think we're looking at ethnic tension in a changing neighborhood," Singer said.

Yet Huntington Station's eight-year-old hiring site, and the Hispanic immigrants who use it, remain a flashpoint. Some see the hiring site as a model for dealing with the growing issue of Latinos crowding the streets looking for work. Others oppose it, saying it creates traffic issues and unfairly caters to those who are in the U.S. illegally.

"There are certain people in our community who are fed up with the illegal immigration and the problems that it has foisted on our community. And they are not shy in that they're going to be vocal," said state Assemb. James Conte, (R-Huntington Station.) "And then there's a number of us who understand that we're not going to deport 12 million people."

Dolores Thompson, head of the Huntington Station Enrichment Center, which started the hiring site, said the town and school district have long sought to avoid dealing with minorities and their needs. Insufficient affordable housing in Huntington Station -- and reluctance to build more -- makes the problem worse, she said.

"That's what the issue has always been. They [the school board] are against affordable housing and they're against more children coming into the schools," she said. "But they're here, and we have to address it."

Planners and some elected officials say that higher-density, lower-cost housing in Huntington -- and throughout Long Island -- is sorely needed. Others oppose it, fearful of overburdening the schools. In 2002, the current school board president, Richard McGrath, rallied 1,500 residents to successfully block a revitalization plan that would have added housing in Huntington Station.



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Growing enrollment

Over the past 15 years, the percentage of Hispanic students enrolled in the district has grown, while the black population has remained steady. In 1991, 11 percent of the district's 4,276 students were Hispanic and 14 percent were black. By 2000, 20 percent were Hispanic and 16 percent black, compared with 24 percent Hispanic and 14 percent black in 2006, according to state Education Department data.

Victoria Campos, a Huntington Station attorney and a member of the town's Hispanic Task Force, said that although the town has done a fairly good job absorbing its new population, she senses animosity aimed at the Latino community.

"I definitely think there is some resentment," she said. "I think that they think that most of them are illegal, they think we don't contribute to society, they think we don't pay our taxes, that we have 30 people living in one place."

The growing presence of Spanish-speaking businesses in Huntington Station defies those stereotypes, she said.

She also said she was surprised to attend a recent school board meeting and see that in a 38 percent minority district, all seven board members are white.

"I definitely think because of the population and the student population, the board needs somebody Hispanic," she said.

Last year, Glenda Jackson became the first African-American member of the Huntington Town Council in its 350-year history. She said she believes the town is "moving in a good direction" when it comes to handling its diversity.

"Certainly I think things are better than they were years ago, but I don't think we've arrived yet," she said.

Paul Johnson, who has been active with the local NAACP, pointed to an absence of blacks in leadership posts throughout Suffolk County and said his family has had to fight the schools for generations.

"Take for instance, my brother's son," he said. "Automatically they put him in a non-regents course, and we kept wondering why he was playing and playing and he never brought any books home."

Johnson's brother demanded his son be placed in a regents course, and eventually he won a college scholarship.

"Now his name is Dr. Johnson," Johnson said.

The 1992 state report on Huntington schools, which pointed out disparities in special education, noted that few minorities were enrolled in advanced classes. But the report also described it as a "model district," with high and improving test scores, small classes and dedicated staff. Today, the district is widely lauded for its dual language program, in which English- and Spanish-speaking students are placed in classes together and have lessons in Spanish two days a week.

Conte, who grew up in Huntington Station, recalls tensions between blacks and whites from his high school days. "But that dissolved on the sports field or in the classroom," he said. Now, he said he is glad his children are exposed to different cultures, and his daughter is enrolled in the dual-language program.

"For people who move their kids out of the district and try to surround them with people just like themselves, I have to say, Huntington High School is the real world," Conte said. "Look at the five boroughs of New York City, where the minorities are the majorities now. You have to begin to understand other cultures and begin to work with them."