Mareesa Nicosia mnicosia@lohud.com

If state oversight of the East Ramapo school board is required to bring more money to the district, the board is "not opposed to the concept," as long as the oversight is "reasonable" and "limited," the board president says in a letter to the governor.

Board President Yehuda Weissmandl responded at length to state fiscal monitor Hank Greenberg's findings that the board "recklessly" mismanaged taxpayer dollars in a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo released this week.

It's the district's first detailed response since Greenberg made his report to the state Board of Regents Nov. 17, urging policymakers to authorize a watchdog who could veto "bad decisions' by the board in real time.

"We have struggled for a long time with misconceptions that are resistant to the facts. We believe these persistent misconceptions are behind the push for state intervention," Weissmandl wrote. "That said, we understand that additional financial resources from the state — which are the answer to our underlying problems — will only come with some form of enhanced oversight of the board and district. We are not opposed to the concept. But we simply believe that the oversight should be reasonable and be limited."

Weissmandl defends the board on some of the monitor's criticisms — it had no choice but to cut budgets, he says — but also acknowledges it needs to improve in other areas, such as community relations.

Read Weissmandl's letter here.

His concession that the board would tolerate some kind of oversight if it came attached to more money is the warmest response yet on the issue from East Ramapo, where leaders unequivocally rejected a $3.5 million advance aid option in June because they felt "insulted" by the stipulation that community members participate in directing use of the funds.

Strengthened oversight of the school board is widely supported by state education officials and Rockland County's state legislators, who have begun to draft a bill based on Greenberg's recommendations.

Cuomo's office and the state Education Department did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Greenberg's appointment, in June, was Cuomo's response to years of pleading by public school activists for state intervention in the impoverished district, where private school students outnumber public school students by more than 2 to 1. At the time, Weissmandl accused Cuomo of "acceding to the demands of bigots" by appointing the monitor to review East Ramapo's fiscal health. He claimed the appointment was motivated less by "claimed fiscal concerns" than divisive politics in the district, and said board members have been targets of anti-Semitism.

East Ramapo's white Orthodox Jewish and Hasidic-controlled school board makes decisions on behalf of 9,000 mostly black and Latino public school students. About 23,000 other students, mostly in the tightly knit ultra-Orthodox communities, go to private religious schools in the district that share some funding in the East Ramapo budget.

In the five-page letter, Weissmandl disputes Greenberg's finding that the board showed favoritism in its treatment of the private schools. Budget cuts to public school programs while more money went to mandated transportation and special-education services for private schools, Weissmandl said, were simply driven by soaring population growth, and the board prioritized mandated over non-mandated items.

"The numbers tell the story," he wrote. "The numbers drove the decision-making process in the district — not favoritism."

He also defended the district's mandate to provide universal busing, to private and public schools alike, though he glossed over the fact that the district cut its own bus fleet this year and awarded contracts to Orthodox companies.

East Ramapo officials have repeatedly pointed to the monitor's finding of "no illegality by the board," as Weissmandl was quick to note in the top of his letter. But he makes no mention of the district's ongoing battle over what the state Education Department says are the district's repeated violations of state and federal law in its placement of students with disabilities in private settings. Greenberg said that, in doing this, the district has left hundreds of thousands of dollars in state reimbursements on the table.

Twitter:@MareesaNicosia