But the situation in the East Ramapo Central School District is more complicated than the kinds of tensions typical of such demographic divides: Very few of the Jewish residents’ children attend public schools. About 27,000 students who live within the district’s borders attend private schools (mainly Jewish yeshivas), while just 8,500 or so—over 90 percent of whom are children of color, mostly black or Latino, and many of whom are English-learning immigrants—attend public schools. Despite that distribution, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish majority has remained in control of the school board for over a decade; just one of the current board’s members, according to the lawsuit, is a member who was voted in with the support of public-school parents.

The result: a school board in which the people making decisions about public-school proceedings have very little if any stake in those proceedings. Not surprisingly, debates have abounded over whether the body really has the public-school students’ interests at heart. Financial difficulty has made these debates all the more urgent; roughly three in four of the district’s students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Tensions consistently run high at school-board proceedings —so high as to have attracted the attention of the national news media. A 2014 This American Life episode was dedicated to the district’s unique situation and dramatic infighting.

Under the current voting protocol, known as an at-large system, each school-board member is elected by all of the district’s voters rather than only by members of the geographic area in which she lives. Under this system, the NYCLU alleges, the district’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish majority has effectively managed to fashion a school-governing body that prioritizes private-school needs. “Communities of color have not seen their candidates of choice win a contested seat since 2007,” the press release states.

And the racial chasms that the situation has both illuminated and exacerbated aren’t just about white privilege and minority disadvantage. Adding even more complexity is the fact that the white students in question are ultra-Orthodox Jews. Charges of anti-Semitism have regularly emerged amid the infighting, and the controversy has evolved into a particularly thorny collision of identities. This latest legal development is a reminder of just how fraught school-board elections can be, especially when they involve a power struggle that places race—and, in this case, disparate cultures and ways of life—at center stage.

The NYCLU lawsuit was brought by eight plaintiffs, including the Spring Valley NAACP and seven black or Latino voters. Two of the plaintiffs are parents of public-school students who ran for seats on the board in 2017 but didn’t win. The lawsuit charges the current voting structure with violating Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race or other minority statuses. According to the NYCLU, to prove that the voting structure is in violation of the act, the plaintiff must only prove that racially polarized voting is taking place, not that there is discriminatory intent. The lawsuit demands the board stop holding elections until the town adopts a “ward” system, which would introduce voting on the basis of geographic districts; there would be nine individual districts, with one member elected to the board from each district.