It is a new school year and time for a new commentary on an old and growing problem: the Jewish day school tuition crisis. We all feel it in different ways. This past school year was particularly crushing for us, because our kids needed special education supports that were very costly.
Several years back, one of our kids needed to leave her Jewish day school and attend a non-Jewish private school for dyslexic students. Her special private school was an amazing place where they reached children who learned differently, but it was expensive. Maybe in a perfect world, Hashem would pair up special needs with wealth. It was only with tremendous miracles from Hashem and kindness from very special people that our daughter received a lifesaving, six-figure elementary and middle school education. From fourth to eighth grade, my daughter’s education was worth about $170,000, which is more than what most people expect to pay for college. I used to wonder how these schools even filled their classrooms, because it seemed like a statistical impossibility to be both learning disabled and wealthy. If twelve percent of students has a learning disability, and only the top two percent of taxpayers can afford to pay the tuition, then there is only a quarter of a percent chance of meeting the student demographic criteria of being someone who needs the school’s unique approach and who is also able to afford to attend.
So, what does all this have to do with the Jewish day schools?
The Jewish schools are encountering the problem of costly special education, and the way they respond to it will decide the course of our future. To their enormous credit, the Jewish schools in Baltimore have developed successful special education programs over the years, growing stronger every day. My husband and I have been at this education thing for a while. We enrolled our oldest child at Talmudical Academy (TA) in 2003, and we have been parents at several other local Jewish schools throughout the past sixteen years, thankfully. Our journey has given us a view from many sides of the mountain, and we have been able to fully appreciate the evolution of special education at our schools. It truly makes my heart skip a beat. Organizations like Shemesh that provide special education supports – from resource rooms to reading specialists to executive function coaches – have revolutionized the Baltimore Jewish day school landscape and have probably saved many lives and souls over the past ten years since their inception.
So, what is the problem?
The problem is that special education, private Jewish day school special education, still costs too much for the average family. Every summer, many parents lose sleep over their tuition bills. However, special needs parents get a tuition bill plus a bill for special education supports. A family that can pay $10,000 for their child’s tuition might get a bill as high as $15,000, because of the extra supports. A family may have a generous annual education budget of $40,000 for their family, but when each child needs support, their bill could rise to $68,000.
A bill like that can crush a low-income family, and it can cause even the well-to-do parents to have a heart attack, a panic attack, or a nervous breakdown. It also poses serious existential questions to the schools. Where do you see yourselves in five years, ten years? Are you a Jewish school that teaches Torah, or are you a business? Is Jewish education a boutique luxury item, or should it be accessible to all Jewish children? Can we afford to include all children, even special needs children? Can we afford not to? Most importantly, are you inclusive or are you exclusive?
Jewish private schools (like most schools, including colleges and universities) employ an economic practice called price differentiation or price discrimination. Price differentiation is a microeconomic pricing strategy that charges different segments of customers altered prices for the same products or services. Colleges and universities appear to use their financial aid awards as a part of a price discrimination strategy. By awarding larger scholarships and grants to some students, the schools effectively lower net tuition costs to certain students. As a result, different students pay different amounts for essentially the same college education. This practice allows colleges to build a competitive student body, desirable to future students.
In the case of Jewish schools, the purpose of price differentiation is not to maximize sales and profits, per say. However, it does function to keep the schools operational. If there were only one set price of, say, $15,000 (the Baltimore City annual cost to educate each student), most of the student body would disappear, because they simply could not afford the cost. Public records show a large number of voucher recipients in each of the local Jewish schools, indicating there are families who fall below the federal poverty line. In addition, the median household income in the neighborhood is $83,560, which is not likely to be enough to comfortably send even one child to a private school at full price, let alone two or three children. When viewing this in the light most favorable to the Jewish schools, price differentiation is not only meant to keep the doors open, but it is meant to allow every student the opportunity to receive a priceless Torah education. In fact, at the TA One-Hundred-Year dinner, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan noted the fact that in one hundred years, TA never turned away a student because they could not pay the tuition. Kol hakavod! Mi ke’amcha Yisrael?!
We must ensure that this practice includes the special education students as well.
When the tuition committees decide what people can afford, they need to know to whom they are speaking. On Yom Kippur, we say that Hashem will decide “mi yichyeh umi yamus – who will live and who will die.” When you tell parents how much they need to pay for fourth grade or tenth grade, for two kids or eight kids, you are making a life-and-death decision for a family. You are deciding if one family can breathe while another has to hold its breath waiting for “oxygen” in the form of a business deal closing or the availability of overtime – or suffocate altogether when even that sliver of hope is unrealistic. You are deciding if one family can sleep soundly at night, while another set of parents is going to toss and turn, deciding between their mortgage and dental work or tuition. Perhaps the most crushing of all, you are deciding which family gets to spend time with their children, preparing them for the next day, and which father or mother has to work overtime, and gets home after their children are already in bed.
You need to be particularly careful with the parents of special needs students. These parents come to you not only with limited funds but also with broken hearts. Their spirits are worn down from battles they have probably been fighting for several years. Some parents live in a constant state of brokenness from year after year of their kids not knowing how to read, how to focus, how to interact with peers, or how to keep pace with the classroom. Their children’s needs may range from processing disorders – such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia – to neurocognitive disorders such as ADHD, and/or to emotional disorders, such as anxiety or depression. For years, these parents have been trying to come up with extra funds to pay tutors and therapists on top of tuition. Some of these parents have spent upwards of $50,000 or $100,000 dollars’ worth of tuition over the years, and their children are still a few grade levels behind! They have been trying to get teachers to see their child and see what he needs, with the hope that maybe this will be the year that their child can actually be taught.
The child whom parents love with all their heart needs to be “tolerated” by others. Our kids do not make it onto the school brochure covers. The school board does not glow with pride that we are among their student/parent body. Yet we continue to push ourselves into schools where we are not wanted, and try to fit our extraordinary children into ordinary spaces that sometimes do not fit them. We do this out of some inexplicable, undying, aching love – a love of Torah, of Hashem, and of our children. His children!
I once read that when Hashem appeared to Moshe in the burning bush, He told Moshe to take off his shoes because he was standing on sacred ground. Why was the ground sacred? The short answer is that Hashem’s presence made it a holy place. A deeper explanation is that the burning bush represents human pain and suffering, and Hashem is telling us that where people have suffered is also a holy place. Hashem is telling us how to act around those who have made painful sacrifices. We take off our shoes to show respect, and tread humbly, because we are now standing near hallowed ground. Our daughter’s special school was full of broken hearts, slowly on the mend. Although the carpool lane was filled with Mercedes and BMWs, the atmosphere was not one of importance; rather, it was a place of humility, sensitivity, and compassion. The pain was what bonded us together. Seeing our children be unable to do the things their same aged peers could do was painful. Seeing our children in pain was unbearable. This type of pain does not discriminate between the poor or the wealthy, Jewish or non-Jewish.
Schools, tuition boards: I know who you are. You are Jewish, and you teach Torah values, chief among them being inclusivity. You are not a business with a financial bottom line. When you deal with parents of special needs students, you need to take extra special care. You must account for special education costs when you decide how much tuition a family can afford. If you allow poor students to attend at lowered costs, then you must allow special needs students to attend at their affordable rate as well. You need to check your math and run the numbers twice, maybe even three times. You may need to meet with them in person – not all parents, just them. You need to look inward and see that you are not, even subconsciously, overpricing them just because it might be easier if they do not come to your school. You need to make sure you are not, G-d forbid, adding more weight to their already crushing burden.
As Hashem said, you need to take your shoes off. You are on sacred ground.
