State education officials, however, point out that East Ramapo’s aid is augmented by other factors in the formula that credit the district for having large numbers of poor children. They also say that the formula applies to all the state’s nearly 700 school districts, many of which have their own inequities.

Still, there is a disparity that hurts East Ramapo, which encompasses all or parts of Spring Valley, Monsey, Nanuet and Chestnut Ridge. The area has experienced a huge growth of Hasidic and other Orthodox Jewish families, almost all of whom send children to yeshivas. The state provides an average of 40 percent of a district’s budget, with wealthier districts getting less and poorer ones more. East Ramapo, however, receives 32.9 percent of its revenue from the state, putting a bigger burden on local taxpayers, who have often balked at paying more.

Image The state monitor, Henry M. Greenberg, who has said the board appears to favor private over public schools. Credit... Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

The formula, known as the Combined Wealth Ratio, is complicated, but in its simplest terms it determines how many students attend public schools and how much wealth the district has to pay for each public school student. In East Ramapo, there are 9,000 public school students and 24,000 private school students in over 50 yeshivas.

When the total value of taxable property in the district is divided solely by the district’s number of public school students, board officials say, East Ramapo seems to have more than enough money to pay for each of its students; more than a neighboring town, Clarkstown, which also has about 9,000 public students, but far fewer private school students. With equivalent wealth ratios, the state may send as much money per student to Clarkstown as it does to East Ramapo.

Harry Phillips III, a longtime member of the Board of Regents and a fierce critic of East Ramapo’s management, acknowledged in an interview that the formula “hurts East Ramapo because their proportion of private and public school students is the worst in the state.” He said a similar situation prevailed in another locale with a large Orthodox Jewish population, Lawrence, on Long Island, and in his hometown district of Greenburgh, in Westchester County, where large proportions of students attend private and parochial schools.

A majority of East Ramapo’s 9,000 public school students are indigent; 77 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Many are children of immigrants and need extra teachers who can provide language classes and remedial reading programs. In contrast, only 6 percent of Clarkstown’s pupils were eligible for a free lunch in 2011.