On Long Island: The Lost Season

One sunny Monday morning in Levittown, Long Island, teen-agers ran out of the small ranch houses and Cape Cods, darting through carports, and leaving back doors swinging and slamming. Some dashed through the streets, shouting, and others exuberantly made haste on their skateboards. One long-haired boy hustled along to the tune of a blaring radio. Their destination? MacArthur High School, a sprawling, two-story brick building with bright turquoise trim, an All-American high school right down to its official colors: red, white and blue. Bouncing" with excitement, the youngsters converged in the schoolyard and waited anxiously for the doors to open.

The kids were celebrating the first day of school almost two months after the last of the nation's other classrooms had hummed back to life. Vacation had blended into fall and Indian summer while the students waited for school to start. Leaves turned brown and fell to the ground. For 34 school days, nearly all Levittown's teachers had been on strike over wages, job security, fringe benefits, and their desire to retain special programs in the curriculum. Only that morning they had agreed to end the longest teacher strike of 1978.

The bitter fight in Levittown between teacher and taxpayer involved basic problems that are plaguing school districts across the country. It was no coincidence that three conservative members were elected to the seven-member school board on the same day that Howard Jarvis pushed the tax-cutting Proposition 13 through in California.

The community thrown into turmoil over its schools sprouted in 1947 in a former potato field. Well suited and priced for ex-G.I.s, Levittown soon became synonymous with instant and inexpensive suburban living: a home of one's own, a plot of land, no big city problems, no industry. Levittown also became a symbol of cookie-cutter suburban sameness (immortalized by Pete Seeger in a song about "little boxes made of ticky-tacky.")

Like other suburbs, Levittown financed its education system mainly through property taxes. In the 1970s, as school costs soared, the tax bill for many of those neat little houses all in a row started hitting $200 and more a month. Original owners, now on fixed incomes and their children grown, found themselves hard pressed. To make matters worse, some people felt they were not getting their money's worth, claiming the schools were failing to teach the basics. The result was a hard line on taxes. "I'm a fighter for my kids," says Joan Anderson, the mother of four. "But I'm working two jobs and my husband is out of work. We just couldn't afford to pay any more."

But the teachers, faced with the same inflationary problems as the taxpayers. had money troubles of their own. Although a strike by teachers is against the law m New York State, only five of the 630 staff members initially crossed the picket lines. Throughout the seven week of the strike, the teachers showed remark able unity and zeal: just one other decided to go back to work.