TORONTO — Although UJA Federation of Greater Toronto spends $10 million a year on Jewish day school tuition subsidies, annual fees are daunting.
Paul Shaviv
Full-day tuition here ranges from almost $11,000 for junior kindergarten at the Toronto Heschel School to $20,100 at the community high school, the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto.
In Pittsburgh, Jewish day schools are offering free tuition to new students in grades 3 to 11 for the coming school year.
The initiative is being paid for by three schools as well as by a grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. Tuition ranges from more than $4,600 to $14,000 (US) per year.
Is the new initiative relevant to Toronto, which doesn’t have a comparable program?
Paul Shaviv, director of education at TanenbaumCHAT, said that UJA Federation, which spends $12 million annually in total on Jewish education, is “by far the most supportive of Jewish education and Jewish schools of any federation in North America.”
As well, he noted, Pittsburgh has approximately 900 students in Jewish day schools, compared to more than 11,000 in Toronto.
However, he added, “the initiative, in providing extra incentives at entry points into the system, is a very interesting one.” He suggested it himself in a report he wrote on Jewish education in Toronto, but it has not been followed up on, he noted.
The Pittsburgh initiative, according to Shaviv, also “signifies a renewed interest and appreciation of the importance and effectiveness of day schools at a time when our own federation seems to be emphasizing informal Jewish education.”
Howard English, UJA Federation’s vice-president of corporate communications, told The CJN that, aside from the difference in the size of the day school populations in Pittsburgh and Toronto, “the purpose of the Pittsburgh initiative is to increase the proportion of students going to day school.” In Toronto, he noted, about one-third of Jewish school-age children go to Jewish day schools.
“Although the numbers could always be higher,” he said, “our numbers are the second-highest [in North America], next to Montreal. That’s not our major challenge. We have been concentrating far more on tuition subsidies to make it financially comfortable.”
English added that the amount of money being spent on tuition subsidies in Toronto is “larger than all the major cities in the United States combined.”
High tuition fees are related in large part to teachers’ salaries – the largest proportion of costs, English said.
Rabbi Jay Kelman – a founder of Torah in Motion who teaches ethics, Talmud and rabbinics at TanenbaumCHAT and is a chartered accountant by training – said that some parents are being “priced out of Jewish education.” He said he knows of a few observant families who are considering sending their children to public school.
Rabbi Kelman believes that the funding issue can be solved in two generations “if we restructure the way we finance the education.”
His idea is based on replacing subsidies with loans for parents who can’t afford tuition. “A lot of middle class parents have no money while they’re going through the system,” he said. “A lot of them will be wealthier 20 years from now.”
He suggests that parents could pay back a loan in the future, or leave 10 per cent of their estate to Jewish education.
As well, a key element of his plan is that parents be given the option of buying $1 to $2 million of life insurance, with their children’s school as beneficiary.
“My ultimate goal is that tuition be reduced by 50 per cent, on condition you buy a $2-million life insurance plan.”
He said the idea hasn’t been well received by schools, whose financial concerns are time-sensitive. To address those concerns, philanthropists would need to offer “bridge financing” in the interim – either as a loan, or preferably a gift, he said. “If we would have done this 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today.”
He added that a couple of variations of the idea are being tried in the United States.
To fund Jewish education is “a communal obligation, not a parental obligation,” Rabbi Kelman said. “Our first priority is to get our kids in the public school system into day school. Our first priority should be to make the cost less expensive.”
Yisroel Janowski, who was involved in trying to get government funding for Jewish day schools as founding president of the Ontario Association of Jewish Day Schools, said that what the federation has been doing to help families who aren’t able to afford tuition is “wonderful, but there is a whole host of other families who are dropping out because they don’t want to go through the scholarship system.”
As well, he said, schools that aren’t affiliated with the federation “are not getting a dime. All kinds of people are not being helped… It’s just not sustainable.”
With files from JTA
