Day schools in crisis - The Jewish Standard

One of the most daunting challenges facing us is the high cost of living an observant lifestyle. Particularly in these difficult economic times, when so many are either unemployed or underemployed, the financial demands seem overwhelming.

For most traditional families, of course, the biggest expense is for tuition. The day school tuition crisis is not something that looms on a distant horizon; it has arrived.

Consider a family with four children earning $200,000 a year. Only 3.5 percent of Americans earn more, yet such families are having difficulty paying tuition bills that typically exceed their mortgage obligations.

Day schools struggle to deliver a high-quality Judaic and secular education to our children. The stress factor is filtering down to families.

Most alarming is the advent of the Hebrew-language charter school option, offering a Jewish education that is comprised of nothing more than the study of linguistics and culture. Parents are considering it for strictly financial considerations.

The tuition problem has been decades in the making. We are now facing a broken and unsustainable system. Our success in dealing with it is going to be crucial in determining what Judaism in America will look like in 25 years.

It is of critical necessity that the Jewish community demonstrates creativity in dealing with the complex and multifaceted issues and challenges surrounding this crisis. At the outset, we should be honest: Generations of Jews have sacrificed in order to educate their children, and we must be willing to follow suit. This is particularly difficult for our generation; many of us have been blessed with prosperity and grown accustomed to living an upper-middle-class lifestyle.

Our grandparents and parents paid tuition, but they rarely if ever took vacations or purchased new vehicles on a regular basis. They lived in small residences that were far more modest than those we live in today. The economic downturn has created a new financial reality for many of us. As such, we need to rethink our lifestyles and reassess our spending habits.

Beyond this, however, we need additional honesty to face the multifaceted and complex issues of this crisis that have been avoided in attempting to maintain the status quo; any call to arms also must include the general community, lay leaders, rabbinate, and even the schools themselves.

Schools must be held accountable for out-of-control spending and quality of education. The increasingly high administrative and infrastructure costs, which were evolving well before the economic downturn, must be restrained. There is a dire need for readjusting financial priorities and fiscal responsibility; we must now ask this of our schools, administrators, and boards of directors.

Different settings present different needs. Providing day schooling for smaller communities versus larger ones creates diverse challenges and cost considerations. Opening multiple schools in close proximity in the name of differing “hashkafot” (personal religious philosophies) now demands critical re-evaluation by communities and parents. Achdut (unity) is a baseline spiritual necessity that comes with cost benefits and economy of scale.

How do we ensure that sustaining our schools becomes a communal responsibility? For starters, we should strongly urge that the majority of one’s charitable giving be kept in the local community and that the majority of those funds be allocated to local schools. Additionally, we should develop a system of communal educational endowment funds in which people leave a small portion of their estates to the local community to assure its viability beyond their lifetimes.

The Orthodox Union recently expanded its efforts to address the tuition challenge by creating a Task Force on Jewish Education Affordability meant to interface with community leaders, institutions, federations, and local schools. We also have enlarged the resources of the OU’s Institute for Public Affairs, which focuses on legislative initiatives on the state and federal levels aimed at assisting day schools. The institute will continue to advocate forcefully for an array of initiatives, including tax credits for scholarship contributions, state support for busing and special education services, along with other opportunities for various legislative breakthroughs toward tuition relief.

The need to partner with Jewish federations and philanthropic organizations is obvious. The OU will continue to urge its leadership to recognize that Jewish continuity can only be assured through Jewish education. To encourage this response, the OU will accept applications for challenge grants starting this fall. Grants will be awarded to inventive, cutting-edge, or novel paradigms that can be implemented, replicated, and have broad communal support.

More than 200,000 students are attending Jewish day schools in America, but that number unfortunately is beginning to shrink.

Making day schools affordable is not an option any longer; it is a priority of the highest order.

JTA Wire Service