During the past few months, we have seen article after article in the press about the high cost of tuition at private schools. While mainstream newspapers have drawn attention to the high cost of private schools, the Jewish press has focused on the rising cost of tuition in Jewish day schools.
In the Orthodox arena, a yeshivah education is mandatory. With the average cost of tuition over $20,000 a year and rising fast, and multiple children in school, it is simply too expensive for average income families.
Orthodox families are in a conundrum. They cant afford the tuition and they have an obligation to provide their children with Jewish educations. They feel trapped and many are running for the public schools.
In the early days of yeshivot, in the Sephardic community, parents who couldnt afford tuition were given the option of working it off by racking up volunteer hours at the school on bus duty, the Bingo parlors, and lunchroom duty. When the old Bingo parlors in the community closed, a more sophisticated scholarship system emerged.
As time went on, more and more safeguards were put into place. Families could submit tax returns, show other expenses and factors which helped the schools determine how much scholarship money was to be provided to them. The schools had to make up the difference and held Chinese Auctions and other fundraising events to make up the shortfall. Today, with nearly half of all families requesting tuition assistance, these efforts are simply not enough.
The issue of tuition affordability in our community has become so pronounced that I attended the Orthodox Union Summit as the Director of Project Education (projectedu.org), a new nonprofit organization in the community that is determined to address the issue on behalf of community yeshivot.
The Summit brought together 175 of the best and brightest minds in Orthodox Jewish education from around the country. Schools, districts, Jewish run charter schools, communities, think tanks and others were represented, along with several members of our community, such as Teach NYS, the Sephardic Community Federation and the Community Federation of Deal.
According to Amy Katz, Executive Director of Partners in Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE), a Boston-based think tank, schools generally have four sources of revenuetuition, campaigns, endowments and the local federation. (Schools In our community do not have endowments.) Katz said that schools need to have better governance, and boards that fully understand that they have a fiduciary responsibility. She said that each school needed a full time development director to raise money and a full time alumni director to engage alumni to keep supporting the school.
Schools investing in professionals are reaping the benefits of increased enrollment, she said. Day schools are multi-million dollar institutions and need to be run that way. Day schools should not look at other institutions as competition but as collaborators.
A major outcome of the Summit is that Jewish education is a communal responsibility. If families cannot afford tuition, for whatever reason, then it is the responsibility of the community as a whole to educate those children. The idea that Jewish education is our obligation, as a community, is one we have forgotten. Community members need to embrace this concept.
Jewish education as a communal responsibility is a paradigm shift the community must move towards.
One of the issues addressed at the Summit is maatzer (the obligation to give 10% of ones income to charity). While charity begins at home, it is important for those who can afford it to make education the priority in their giving. When Project Education did the math, they found that if the budgets of all the non-profit institutions in the community were combined, education accounts for two-thirds of both the budgets and the shortfall.
This agrees with the outcome from the Orthodox Union Summit on Tuition Affordability and the conclusion that education must be the priority, when determining where to give your donor dollars.
One goal of the Summit was to bring together bright minds with the idea of merging our thoughts and ideas and to bring those recommendations to our individual communities and schools so they could benefit from the successes of others.
The Summit highlighted the need for the Jewish community to recognize the fact that tuition affordability needs to be at the forefront of our thinking and that there needs to be urgency and seriousness in addressing it.
Indeed, we see in our own community that many families are strapped, struggling to make ends meet in a difficult economy, and cannot afford to pay for tuition. In the past decade the schools have seen an increase in the number of students needing tuition assistance rise from 30% to nearly 50%. The numbers are astounding and the schools are struggling to make ends meet.
Today, many yeshivot no longer provide scholarships, they provide tuition assistance. This is an important change in terminology. A scholarship implies that the money is given to you without any expectation of repayment. Tuition assistance is just that, assistance. The implication is that families are only given support if they do not have the financial resources to pay full tuition. Further, there is growing sentiment among school administrators and boards, that if recipients of financial aid are able to, at some point, even after their children graduate, pay the money back to the school there is a moral and ethical obligation to do so.
Schools need strategic, long term financial planning, transparency and fiscal integrity. Donors want to know where their dollars are going and that the finances are being handled responsibly. Joint purchasing is another good idea that came out of the summet. When schools merged forces for purchasing, they were able to save 10% on their budgets.
Schools that outsourced certain services, such as janitorial needs saw significant budget savings.
Applying online learning and differentiated learning increased the student/faculty ratio and saved money across the board and aggressive facility rental can bring in significant income, when schools rent their unused or under-utilized facilities.
The OU is supporting seven innovative initiatives through its Day School Affordability Challenge Grants. One of the grants, the only one in the NY area, was received by Project Education to educate the Sephardic community in NY and NJ that Jewish education is a communal responsibility and that our schools should receive priority when giving.
The OU is calling on rabbis and synagogues to join hands with them and make this happen. The goal is a paradigm shift such that Jewish education in our community will be the first place you send your donor dollars. The OU is asking that our rabbis and community leaders consistently repeat this message and promote guidelines on tzedekah giving.
There are other things we can do as community members to support our schools, for example, community members should think about including the school that provided their children with their educations in their estate plans.
As a result of the Summit, the OU has committed itself to several policy initiatives, including ensuring that yeshivah children receive basic federal services such as security, after school and entitlement programs, federal funding for modernization and energy efficient efforts such as lighting and window replacement, and that parents of special needs children get financial relief.
In addition to making yeshivot a communal priority and responsibility, the OU is committed to sharing solutions that work. In cooperation with PEJE, it will produce case studies and examine best practices that have successfully addressed the tuition issue.
Parents want their children to receive top quality educations. And it costs money to run a school. With a depressed economy and businesses cutting back on employees and spending, the tuition issue will not go away quickly. Families will continue to struggle, but efforts can be made to mitigate costs.
And those who can afford to help are asked to make Jewish education in our community a priority, so that our schools are sustainable in the future.
Jewish education is a communal responsibility. Its as simple as that.
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A frequent contributor to IMAGE, community member Sarina Roffe holds a BA in Journalism and an MA is Jewish Studies. President of the Sarina Roffe Group, she is a management consultant with a passion for our communitys history.
