Jewish education in this country took a significant hit last week when the Ottawa Jewish Community School (OJCS) announced plans to close its high school program. In a letter, Aaron Smith, president of the OJCS’s board of directors relayed the unfortunate news: “A recent examination by OJCS leadership… has determined that the high school is not financially viable.”
“Put simply,” he added, “not enough families are choosing to send their children to grades 9 through 12.”
The high school needs “a minimum additional subsidy of $250,000 on an annual and ongoing basis, on top of regular operating costs, to avoid a deficit,” Smith explained. It requires 50 students a year to be sustainable, but this year just 24 are enrolled, and the school was expecting total enrolment of only 20 students for the next scholastic year. (The elementary school program, meanwhile, “is strong, sustainable, and is receiving continued support,” Smith noted.)
The continuing viability of Jewish day schools is one of the greatest challenges facing Canadian Jews, and while the situation in Ottawa is a particularly dramatic example, declining enrolment is an issue across Canada. As Daniel Held, executive director of the Julia and Henry Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education in Toronto, and a CJN columnist, admits in this week’s paper, the issue “keeps me up at night.”
According to Held, there are two issues at play: affordability and sustainability. “Day school financial sustainability requires a longterm plan to ensure that revenue covers costs,” he writes. “Affordability necessitates a demonstration of the value of day school vis-à-vis the cost of tuition.”
In the wake of its closure, the OJCS administration has vowed “to begin a community engagement process to understand what the community is looking for in a supplementary high school program.” Supplementary Jewish schooling may not be as effective a tool of communal engagement as full day school, but, like summer camps, it can offer an affordable Jewish experience. It seems clear that’s an option more and more families are looking for.
Similarly, youth groups can also contribute significantly to Jewish education. And, as reporter Lila Sarick documents in this week’s CJN, many Jewish youth groups are exploring new ways to attract kids. Modern Jewish youth groups, Sarick argues, “have to offer more than playing Ping-Pong in a shul basement on Shabbat afternoon.”
And yet, youth groups face their own issues when it comes to remaining relevant: “Groups which focus on a specific niche,” Sarick writes, are facing “a challenging landscape.” The groups that appear to be having the most success in recent years, including NCSY, are responding by “making partnerships across denominations and reaching beyond the traditional high school age to younger students and alumni.” That’s a model that might have once seemed unthinkable; now it appears to be working well.
The closure of Ottawa’s Jewish high school underscores the serious challenge of sustaining Jewish day schools in Canada. As we work to solve that problem, it’s worth remembering there are educational alternatives to day school. The community must invest time and resources to make these options attractive to young Jews, and affordable for their parents. The future could depend on it. — YONI
