Students at ORT’s Belgrano school, one of two large Jewish technical junior high and high schools run by ORT in this city, customized cars themselves.

“Our teaching philosophy is to give students the possibility of interacting with knowledge in various ways -- not just through books, but also hands-on, to apply what they learn in problem solving,” said Alejandro Ferrari, director of studies at ORT's Belgrano campus.

The Citroen lab is one of many interactive educational projects at the Belgrano and Almagro schools. There’s also a state-of-the-art music recording studio, radio station, TV studio, computer engineering facilities, industrial design rooms, software labs and an online virtual campus (campus.ort.edu.ar) -- not to mention classrooms for more conventional subjects like history, literature and English (for which there are also interactive programs).

The schools, whose student population is mostly but not exclusively Jewish, also have mezuzahs on the doors, synagogues and a mandatory Jewish studies curriculum.

It’s all part of a package that has made ORT’s schools in Buenos Aires among the best in Argentina -- and a top draw for students and parents. The schools have generated such high interest that they attract not only students from unaffiliated Jewish families that otherwise never would consider sending their kids to a Jewish school, but also non-Jews drawn to ORT’s curriculum and facilities. Several government ministers send their children to the schools.

“We’re doing things that many second-year university students are learning to do,” said one student, Cindy. “It’s awesome.”

Read the full article at www.JTA.org.

 

School set up by local families offers less formal, and less expensive, alternative for the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremony.

Many families who join the school are seeking traditional Jewish education without the heavy trappings of obligation that can accompany a more formal religious lifestyle.

Some are in interfaith marriages. Some want their children to learn about Jewish culture without an expensive synagogue affiliation, which generally runs at least $2,000 in basic dues annually, and often more than $5,000 for families enrolled in additional Hebrew and religious training classes.

The Sunday School, on the other hand, keeps its fees as bare-bones as possible, at $1,000 annually for tuition, with a discount for siblings, according to its education coordinator, Dori Stern.

Read more here.

Dollars may be scarce, but there were plenty of ideas to go around at a community forum last Monday night addressing the current financial crisis in Jewish day schools.

Those ideas included: sharing more resources, enhancing fundraising and development efforts, moving to egalitarian tuition plans, considering "no-frills" yeshivot, appealing to the wider Jewish community, having day schools operate more like efficient businesses, exploring charter schools, tax credits and vouchers - even reaching out to other religious and ethnic communities for solutions.

More than 270 concerned parents, teachers and clergy came out on a week night to attended the program, sponsored by UJA-Federation of New York's Westchester region and eight local Orthodox synagogues. It was entitled "Day School Education in Challenging Times: Family, Institutional and Communal Responsibility" and held at the Young Israel of New Rochelle.

The three participants were Jonathan Woocher, chief ideas officer for the Jewish Educational Service of North America (JESNA); Scott A. Shay, past chair of the UJA-Federation's Commission on Jewish Identity and Renewal and chair of the Fund for Jewish Education, and Amy Katz, associate director of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE).

Read more here.

As the community continues to struggle with the high costs of Jewish day school, the Jewish Center of Teaneck is planning to launch an after-school program in the fall to supplement a public school education.

Mentioned in the Mifgashim listserv this week, this program is the New Jersey community's reaction to the problem of day school affordability. Read more here. 

This past week, two Jewish institutions with distinguished records for excellence in Jewish education - the Trocki Hebrew Academy, and the Jewish Community Day School - merged into a unified and pluralistic new entity, to be known as the Trocki Jewish Community Day School (TJCDS).Read more here. 

No one could have wished for the current economic crisis, which is adding new pressures to an already somewhat stressed day school system.  But, as many others have noted, a good crisis "concentrates the mind" and may make not only thinkable, but necessary, actions that otherwise would likely have been avoided.

 In our report on "Day School Education in Challenging Times" we catalogued a fairly large number of potential strategies for day schools facing enrollment and financial challenges.  Many of these, unfortunately, require up front investment of additional resources in order to realize dividends down the road.  In "normal" times, this may be highly advisable, if always difficult, to do.  Spend a little now to save (or make) a lot later.  But, in the current situation, for many schools and communities, spending even a little more now is simply not possible.

So, it makes sense that some schools and a number of funders of day schools (especially federations) are looking in a different direction: toward efficiencies and improvement of the "product" that can be achieved through greater cooperation, collaboration, and even consolidation.  I believe that schools can anticipate greater pressure to move in this direction, and this will be a test of their readiness and ability to think differently about their work, about what they must do by themselves and what they can do with others.

Till now, most day schools have had the luxury of being able to operate almost entirely autonomously.  And there are good reasons for wanting to preserve this and to encourage the existence of many "flavors" of day schools.  But, the era of unchallenged autonomy may be ending, and this is not a bad thing.  Even without the current crisis, it simply makes good sense to try to maximize the use of scarce resources, and if this means foregoing some measure of independence and having schools work together in a more coordinated fashion on both educational and administrative matters, we should be open to and even encouraging of such developments.

In my own community of MetroWest, New Jersey, our three day schools have begun to cooperate more extensively, with a strong boost from our federation and Jewish community foundation.  So far, the results seem highly positive.

Of course, in a community with only one day school, figuring out who to cooperate with and how to do it is a different challenge.  But, even there, "affiliating" small schools with larger out-of-town ones, sharing services with local synagogues, JCCs, or the federation, and using technology to reduce costs or expand opportunities may be strategies that make sense.

The bottom line is that we may well be entering a new era when day schools will have to behave more like parts of a real "system," instead of simply going it alone.  The change will be somewhat wrenching, but I think that ultimately it will be for the better.

Conversation about "Day School Education in Challenging Times" is circulating on the web. Some of the responses from Lookstein's listserv, Mifgashim, are below. You can read the full responses here.

Would you like to contribute to the conversation? We are eager to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment below.

 

*From Rabbi David Vorspan, New Community Jewish High School:

I read the report and was impressed by its breadth and creativity. It offers excellent guidelines that should help sustain intensive Jewish education in a number of challenging settings. The options to the traditional Day School model I found particularly noteworthy.

 

*From Karen Lieberman, Milwaukee Jewish Day School:

There's definitely some out-of-the-box thinking in the document, (e.g., recruiting non-Jewish students to increase tuition revenue, which could certainly get dicey), but I think it mostly reflects a well-researched and well-organized compilation of lots of ideas that have probably been floating around many Jewish Day School board, committee and staff meetings.

*From Rabbi Jack Nahmod, Solomon Schecter Westchester:

Warren Buffet famously said that only when the tide goes out do we know who is not wearing a swimsuit. In Jewish education today, what is our swimsuit?

The JESNA report on "Day School Education in Challenging Times" does a very good job of providing the fundamental building blocks for strong schools. It is striking, though, that strategies for marketing and outreach/inreach are placed here before program and education. Might not attracting and retaining students depend more on what is being marketed than how it is being marketed?
 
Implicit throughout this report are the issues of school vision and mission. However, their explicit and profound treatment would be valuable. A school that does not know what it is truly about - what its core values are - will have a difficult time making the hard decisions.

 

 

 

Welcome to the blog on "Day School Education in Challenging Times." This blog has been created as an accompaniment to the Lippman Kanfer Institute's new report, entitled "Day School Education in Challenging Times: Examining the Strategic Options." (You can read the report by clicking here.)

Several months ago, the Lippman Kanfer Institute, a think tank on innovation and change in Jewish education at JESNA, was asked to look at the situation of day schools that find themselves facing persistent enrollment and financial challenges that potentially threaten their viability and educational vitality. What are the options available to such schools (and the communities in which they are located)? How can they strengthen themselves, or, if the situation simply does not allow for a viable school to be maintained, what alternatives might be considered that can provide at least some of the rich educational and community experience that Jewish day schools are noted for?

The report that resulted from the Institute's exploration of these questions is designed to help day school and community leaders think through their options in a systematic fashion. Based on extensive input from national and local day school and educational leaders, "Day School Education in Challenging Times" identifies and analyzes more than forty strategies that schools might adopt to strengthen their enrollments, educational programs, and finances, and also presents eight alternative models to consider when circumstances make it unfeasible to operate as a conventional day school.

The report, however, is just a starting point, and so, we've set up this blog to encourage you to continue the conversation with us. What's the situation facing your school or community? What approaches have you tried? What has worked, and what hasn't? What do you think about the report's recommendations? What challenges do they pose? If you're trying some of them, what is your experience like?

As more leaders discuss the proposed strategies and models and contribute their insights, experiences, critiques and concerns, the collective wisdom available to the field at a challenging time will grow.

We'll be posting some of our further thoughts and questions on the blog, and we invite you to respond. We also invite you to come up with your own submissions, which we will post. Just email them to amarx@jesna.org.

These are challenging times. But, as a community, we have the intellectual resources to see us through them and to emerge with stronger institutions, including more vibrant and viable day schools. It will require some innovative thinking, a willingness to experiment, hard work, and patience. Please join in sharing your ideas and reporting on your successes and not-yet-successes.

Let the conversation begin.