Board of Education of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet

Circumstances peculiar to the village of Kiryas Joel led to this case. In the early twentieth century the Jews living in the vicinity of Satmar, a town near the border of Romania and Hungary, became a distinct religious community, the Satmar Hasidim, under the leadership of Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum. Following the Holocaust the Satmar Hasidim emigrated to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. In the early 1970s the Satmars purchased an undeveloped area within the town of Monroe, New York, with the intent of creating a village made up exclusively of their followers. The Satmars achieved incorporation of their village, named Kiryas Joel, in 1977. The village of Kiryas Joel, with its homogeneous population sharing a single religious belief, maintained a private school system offering an Orthodox Jewish curriculum, including segregation of the sexes and emphasis on Torah teachings and limited instruction in secular subjects. The village had no public school system prior to 1989, in that there were no non-Satmar students in the district. With no public school system, Kiryas Joel did not provide special education courses and services to children with disabilities. To meet this need the adjoining Monroe-Woodbury, New York public schools offered special education services to Kiryas Joel students in 1984.