Shannon Mullen, and Andrew Ford

Asbury Park Press

LAKEWOOD - State law enforcement officers seized computer equipment and other records in a series of afternoon raids Wednesday targeting a private special-education school, the School for Children with Hidden Intelligence.

Officers from the New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety’s Division of Criminal Justice used a pallet jack to haul away stacks of cardboard boxes from the school building on Oak Street shortly before 7 p.m.

One box was labeled “SCHI Invoices 11-12,” another “SCHI Deposits,” and a third “Services.”

Earlier in the evening, authorities at an off-site school office in a Route 9 plaza carried out 11 cardboard boxes and three black computer bases.

No reason was given for the raids. A spokesman for the New Jersey Attorney General's Office declined comment.

Reached on his cell phone, the school’s executive director, Mark A. Seigel, declined comment.

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The Route 9 office is in the same office plaza as the CHEMED federally qualified health clinic and the Ocean County Health Department’s Women, Infants and Children Program, neither of which was a target of Wednesday’s raids.

"It has nothing to do with us," said Victoria Miragliotti, the health department's director of administration.

Miragliotti said officers mistakenly entered the WIC office, thinking it was the Lakewood Board of Education, which used to be located next door where SCHI now has an office.

“It was the wrong address,” she said.

Schools Superintendent Laura A. Winters said the district wasn't a target of the search, either.

"The district offices were not visited today," she said in a text message.

A community icon

Known by its acronym, SCHI (pronounced “shy”) has been a fixture in the township’s Orthodox Jewish community for decades — as well as a lightning rod for controversy.

Started in the mid-1990s with just five students by the father of a disabled Orthodox boy, it grew dramatically over the years, mirroring the expansion of the surrounding Orthodox community.

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The school's rapid evolution culminated in 2007 with its move to a 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility on a 13-acre campus on Oak Street, with room for 250 students.

Subsequent additions, funded by grateful parents and other Orthodox donors, have enlarged the school even further. It now has more than 450 employees on staff, according to its 2014 federal tax filing.

Over the years, SCHI has become a featured stop for prominent rabbis, elected officials and other visiting dignitaries. Gov. Chris Christie paid a visit there in 2012, drawing criticism for bypassing the township’s struggling public schools. On several occasions over the years the Asbury Park Press has asked to tour the school, but was rebuffed.

While praised for its work with handicapped children and the high caliber of its facilities, the school has drawn criticism for its high tuition — now more than $97,000 per year, a rate set by the New Jersey Department of Education — and the overwhelmingly white, Orthodox composition of its student body.

The school is nonsectarian, a requirement of private specialized schools that receive taxpayer-funded student referrals from public school districts. Yet the vast majority of students placed there by the Lakewood school district over the years have been Orthodox children.

That fact has drawn the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Education Law Center, a Newark-based legal advocacy group, both of which have questioned why so few minority children from Lakewood's predominantly Hispanic and black public schools have been placed there. In the past, district officials have said few minority parents have sought such placements for their children.

An investigation by the New Jersey Department of Education in 2006 found that the district’s special-education referrals showed a clear pattern of racial discrimination, and called for corrective action, but the report was quietly retracted.

"The truth of the matter is, we could not find a person in our community to say that, 'I wanted (my child) to go to SCHI and I was denied,'" said the Rev. Glenn Wilson, the leader of Lakewood U.N.I.T.E., a group that represents the interests of the district's public school families.

Wilson and others have questioned why the district can’t keep more special-needs students in the public schools, rather than placing them in costly private schools like SCHI. Earlier this month, the school board voted to approve the placement of 199 children in SCHI for the 2016-17 school year.

Wilson was out of town Wednesday and learned about the raids from a reporter.

“If there’s something to find, I hope they find it,” he said.

Contributing: Kathleen Hopkins, Jean Mikle, Karen Yi, Russ Zimmer

Shannon Mullen: 732-643-4278; smullen4@gannettnj.com