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February 23, 2001/Shevet 30, 5761, Vol. 53, No.21
Day schools unite
Valley schools combine efforts to attract students
BETH OLSON
Editorial Assistant
Rebecca Prager shares her research on the Cinnamon Bear with her kindergarten class at Beth El.
Photo by Fran Green |
There are as many Jewish students attending Catholic high schools in the Valley as those attending Jewish day schools, according to Elaine Schreiber, acting chairwoman of the new Jewish Community Day School Consortium.
"To have 420 Jewish students at Brophy (College Preparatory) is outrageous," stresses Fred Zeidman, assistant executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix.
Increasing Jewish day school attendance is the central goal of the new consortium, which is made up of representatives from all of the local Jewish day schools and the Bureau of Jewish Education. The group is developing a series of marketing strategies to advance Jewish education in the community.
"Our aim is to promote not a particular day school, but the idea of day school and to change the culture and have a realization of what day schools can mean to families here in the community," explains Schreiber.
The consortium held its first meeting Feb. 8, which was attended by representatives from the Pardes Jewish Day School, Tri-City Jewish Community Center Day School, Phoenix Hebrew Academy, The Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School, Phoenix Preparatory High Schools, The King David School and the BJE.
Also attending the meeting was Jonathan Woocher, executive director of the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA). Woocher presented a national perspective of Jewish education in the United States.
Schreiber is also part of the national Jewish education scene and participates in the national task force for JESNA; a day school task force of United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of Jewish federations in North America; and she serves on the steering committee for the donor's assembly of Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, an organization devoted to improving Jewish day school education.
She says that the local consortium is being looked at on a national level and that other communities are looking at Phoenix as a "pilot project."
"We're hoping that what we develop here - this marketing program - will be able to be used in other communities," says Schreiber.
The consortium was based on the findings of the Task Force on Jewish Day School Alternative Funding, also chaired by Schreiber. The task force was formed through the work of the federation, the Jewish Community Foundation and the Commission on Jewish Continuity and Community.
While the original purpose of the task force was to examine the issue of tuition as a barrier to Jewish education; according to Zeidman, the focus shifted with introduction of the Arizona private school tuition tax credit.
The tax credit allows individuals to donate up to $500 per tax year to specially created private school scholarship organizations and then receive the money back as a tax credit.
There are three of these organizations that serve Jewish day schools in the Valley: The Jewish Community Day School Scholarship Fund services the Pardes Jewish Day School, The King David School, the Tri-City JCC Day School, Temple Beth El Kindergarten, Valley of the Sun JCC Kindergarten and The Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School; The Cheder services Phoenix Hebrew Academy and Tucson Hebrew Academy; and the Chabad Tuition Organization funds Phoenix Preparatory High Schools.
Once the scholarships alleviated some of the financial burden of attending day school, the task force felt that the issues had become, according to Zeidman, how to create a climate to support Jewish day school education and sustain it and how to get parents to think seriously about Jewish day school education as an option.
After conducting several meetings and seminars, the task force created a report, "Creating a Climate for Jewish Day School Education," which provides some answers to these questions.
Addressed in the report are several issues, including the cost of tuition (cited as $4,500 to $7,000 per year), the number of Jewish pupils attending non-Jewish private schools (estimated in the report between 450 and 500 students) and the percentage of pupils who attend Jewish preschool and do not continue on to attend Jewish day school (the report states that there were 785 pupils enrolled in Jewish preschools during the 1999/2000 school year, but only 477 enrolled in Jewish day schools).
The report also outlines several strategies to "change the climate of day school education," such as increasing marketing efforts; supporting teachers with salaries, benefits and education; promoting the tuition tax credit program; publicizing the advantages of day school education, small class sizes and smaller schools; and creating a "roadshow" to take to preschools in order to educate parents about the advantages of day school education.
The consortium's purpose is to then implement these strategies, according to the report.
Zeidman says that once there is a shift in how the community views day school education, the result will be an increase in scholarship contributions.
"As a community we have an obligation to create an environment, a culture, where parents see the value of a Jewish day school education. The other half of that is if families and the community see the value of that in the long run, that should attract the dollars to support it in terms of scholarship dollars (and) good salaries for qualified, excellent teachers, for equipment, and facilities."
Randy Warner is the president of the Jewish Community Day School Scholarship Tuition Organization. During his year-and-a-half-long tenure, he says he's been surprised at how many families cannot afford tuition costs.
"While there are a number of people attending our schools who can afford them, there are a surprising number who can't. Sitting through the application process and going through the applications one by one - it's a humbling experience because you realize some people's income ... is incredibly low," says Warner.
Warner's day school tuition organization is made up of a board of directors, which includes two representatives from each of the six participating schools. According to Warner, this group actively participates in fund raising for the organization, including mailings, newspaper advertisements and telephone calls.
He says that one of the biggest challenges is that each individual can only donate the $500 allowable by the state. Therefore, rather than getting current donors to increase their donation, they can only get an increase by expanding the base of people from whom they are receiving contributions.
Once the organization receives all contributions for the tax year, it begins distributing scholarships. The day school tuition organization will give out more than $580,000 in scholarships for the 2001-2002 school year, according to Zeidman.
The Jewish Community Day School Scholarship Tuition Organization has a scholarship committee, consisting of Warner and a representative from each school, who review the scholarships applications and make awards based on that review.
The scholarship process is anonymous, but as an extra precaution, no parents of current pupils at any of the schools may participate on the committee, says Warner.
Each scholarship application is reviewed individually, and the committee considers family size, income and special circumstances, Warner explains. Scholarship amounts vary for each individual, but every family is expected to make some contribution toward tuition.
"The board (of the scholarship fund) feels strongly that to value the day school education, the family should have to pay something," says Zeidman.
The applications do not ask if the pupil is Jewish, so non-Jewish pupils may be awarded scholarships depending on the policy of the school.
Currently the federation is only
overseeing the day school tuition organization, although Zeidman says that both Phoenix Hebrew Academy and the Preparatory High Schools were invited to join the organization at its inception.
"I think the Jewish Community Day School Scholarship Fund still believes that all of the day schools working together would benefit more than having separate tuition organizations," he emphasizes.
Rabbi Harris Cooperman, principal of the Phoenix Hebrew Academy, says that the academy does not take part in the Jewish Community Day School Scholarship Fund because their tuition organization was formed a year earlier.
"We didn't want to lose out on the opportunity," he explains. "We had the whole thing in motion already."
Cooperman does say that the possibility of joining the federation's organization "remains open."
Although no specific details have been laid out at this point, says Schreiber, the consortium will have future meetings that will lead to the implementation of the strategies outlined by the task force.
Zeidman also sees the consortium's potential.
"The hope is that this will become the advocacy group and think tank for Jewish day school education in our community and that that will be the group that is the catalyst for developing a very strong culture ... that supports Jewish day school education."
Scholarship applications for the Jewish Community Day School Scholarship Tuition Organization are available from participating day schools, or the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix. Contact Marney Smith at 602-274-1800, ext. 114. Applications are due by 4 p.m. Friday, March 2.
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