Amid the fevered last hours of New York State budget negotiations on Friday, with lawmakers scrambling to beat the April 1 deadline, a single, seemingly esoteric issue threatened to derail it all: state oversight of religious schools.
Top lawmakers accused one senator, Simcha Felder, of Brooklyn, of essentially holding the $168 billion budget hostage until the state agreed not to interfere with the curriculum at the private Jewish schools known as yeshivas. Some critics have accused the schools, which focus on the study of traditional Jewish texts, of leaving students without a basic command of English, math, history or science.
The drama highlighted Mr. Felder’s unique sway in Albany. As a Democrat who caucuses with the Republicans, thus giving them a slim majority in the chamber, he is courted by both parties; both are loath to alienate him or the overwhelmingly Orthodox Jewish population he represents.
And on Saturday, when the final budget passed at 4 a.m., Mr. Felder’s influence seemed confirmed. The legislation carved out special standards for schools with especially long school days, bilingual programs and nonprofit status — in effect, yeshivas — in determining whether they offered educations equivalent to those at public schools, as required by law.
“Parents should have the ability to decide what sort of education their children receive,” Mr. Felder said in an interview on Monday, calling the bill the “beginning of a process that not only pertains to yeshivas but to alternative schools of any sort.”
Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, a veteran Democrat from Queens who chairs that chamber’s education committee, was blunt about the political calculus behind the yeshiva language. “Even if we had to do something for Simcha,” she said, “we could have minimized the damage to kids with narrowed language.”
But Mr. Felder’s victory quickly began to seem less decisive.
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