Pine Bush High School has been involved in several well-known controversies over the last 10 years. • In 2012, five Jewish students brought a lawsuit against
Pine Bush Central School District claiming that they experienced anti-Semitic slurs, graffiti, physical attacks, and jokes related to
The Holocaust during their time in elementary, middle, and high school. New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo ordered an investigation into these allegations in 2013.
Pine Bush Central School District settled this lawsuit in 2015, and paid the plaintiffs $4.48 million. • In 2015, a student read the
Pledge of Allegiance in
Arabic in an effort to celebrate national Foreign Language Week. This caused school and community-wide controversy as students and community-members associated the reading with conflict in the
Middle East. This incident garnered nation-wide attention and resulted in an apology from the school principal, Aaron Hopmayer. • In 2019,
The New York Times wrote a follow-up article about how anti-Semitism still plagues
Pine Bush Central School District. The article explains that the school district surveyed a portion of their students and found that 766 respondents in middle and high school said that they had seen or heard anti-Semitism in school in the last year. ==References==