Fork Lane Elementary School in Hicksville has been flagged by the state for subpar academic performance, placing the Nassau County district on New York’s accountability list for the 2025-26 school year.
The state Department of Education classified Fork Lane as an ATSI school, meaning it has shown low academic performance across multiple years. Any district that has a school with that designation gets listed as a “target district” as well. Hicksville is one of 16 Long Island school districts now carrying that label.
Superintendent Theodore Fulton isn’t hiding from the findings. “We are committed to our students’ academic improvement and are confident that the measures implemented in the 2025-2026 school year will strengthen future academic performance,” Fulton said in a statement. He added that the district’s School Comprehensive Education Planning team is already working through a plan created last school year, which all target districts are required to produce.
That plan focuses on four areas: student achievement inside and outside the classroom, family and community engagement, a supportive professional environment, and operations and facilities. It’s designed to make lesson content more accessible and address academic and linguistic demands through teacher professional development. After-school tutoring for Fork Lane students is also part of the package.
Accountability designations like the one Fork Lane received don’t come out of thin air. The state is federally required to identify schools with the lowest academic performance, measuring student achievement, progress of English language learners, attendance, and graduation rates for high schools. The designations driving Hicksville’s classification are based primarily on data from the 2024-25 school year, with graduation rates pulled from 2023-24.
There are three main designations: CSI, ATSI, and TSI. All three represent the strongest accountability classifications.
Statewide, 375 schools landed on the 2025-26 list across those three categories. Twenty-three of them are on Long Island. ATSI schools carry their designation from prior years as TSI schools, meaning Fork Lane’s struggles aren’t new to the state’s radar. Schools in any of the three categories can exit their support models and move to a lighter designation called LSI, but not until the second school year after initial identification at the earliest.
In Nassau County, Hicksville isn’t alone. Hempstead School District was the only other Nassau district flagged in the report, according to Long Island Press. Suffolk County had a much longer list: 14 districts identified as target districts.
State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa framed the accountability process as something districts should see as helpful rather than punitive. “Accountability is a powerful catalyst for meaningful change and stronger outcomes for students,” Rosa said in a February statement. “By aligning each school with a tailored support model, we can meet communities where they are and work in partnership to drive lasting improvement.”
Whether parents in Hicksville see it that way is a separate question. For families at Fork Lane, the ATSI label raises real concerns about what their kids are getting day-to-day, particularly English language learners, who are specifically measured in the state’s formula. The New York State Education Department’s accountability framework gives districts a roadmap for improving, but the work of actually improving falls on teachers, administrators, and the community around the school.
Hicksville’s plan does at least show the district understands what’s being measured. Teacher professional development aimed at linguistic accessibility is a direct response to the English language learner component of the state’s criteria. After-school tutoring addresses the raw achievement gap. The four-part framework Fulton outlined covers community and operational dimensions that test scores alone don’t capture.
Still, fork in the road is a fair description of where Fork Lane sits. The district can follow through on its plan and work toward that LSI exit in the coming years, or it can stay stuck in the accountability cycle. The National Center for Education Statistics tracks long-term performance trends for schools in similar situations, and the data consistently show that sustained, targeted intervention tied to specific student populations makes the difference when districts do get out.
For now, Fulton and his team have committed publicly to the work. With 23 Long Island schools on the state’s most serious accountability lists and parents in Nassau and Suffolk watching closely, the pressure isn’t going away before the 2026-27 school year begins.