By: Aryeh Klapper

There is a lot of hand-wringing these days about whether the rising costs of Jewish day schools are sustainable.  The discussion has been about money: How can we get more?  How can we spend less?  These questions miss the point: The largest costs of high day school tuition are not financial but moral, and the key to solving the financial dilemma is to address the moral problem.

What are the moral costs?  Imagine that someone proposes a new Jewish practice that would have these consequences:

a. Parents take second jobs, or work longer hours, that deprive them of almost all weekday contact with their children and leave them too exhausted to make Shabbat meaningful.

b. Almost half of households are transformed, for years, from community contributors to charity recipients.

c. Children aspiring to intellectual, creative, or service work, such as teaching (especially Torah) or other helping professions, are told that these are not options because they will not produce enough money to sustain a committed Jewish lifestyle.

d. For economic reasons, families choose to have fewer children.

We would consider such a practice stunningly irresponsible.  Yet these are real-life consequences of current day school tuition, even as the community seems committed to making day school education a requirement of serious Jewish child-rearing.  How can we live with these consequences?

Furthermore, parents receiving day school financial aid have no guarantee, and often no idea, of how they will be affected by tuition hikes or whether the school will take account of a job loss, a new baby, a car’s breakdown—or, on the other hand, a gift from a parent or extra income from a second job.  They cannot make future plans; they are chronically dependent on other people’s decisions.  They are deprived of economic dignity.  Indeed, financial aid applications require families to state their expenses in often-humiliating detail.  They know a committee will sit in judgment of their priorities.  A family that eats pasta all month so it can go to a movie risks an aid cut because it spends on entertainment.  A family that uses an inheritance to visit yet-unseen relatives in Israel risks a cut because it can afford travel.

The price of poverty is often loss of privacy.  This is an evil, which we should minimize.  But the current system maximizes intrusions on privacy by forcing people who make five times the median income to apply for charity.  Because the maximum tuition is unaffordable even for many families earning over $200,000 per year, they are forced into a financial aid system that  requires complete financial disclosure.

The system also undermines the schools’ Jewish effectiveness.  If our children lack Jewish passion, doesn’t that bespeak parental exhaustion?  If they are materialistic, isn’t this related to their being told that their career paths are limited because they are poor?  When they show signs of being “at risk,” doesn’t this reflect lessened parental involvement?  How can children internalize the core Jewish value of human dignity and the spiritual value of financial independence when their schools make them dependent?

Should we therefore undo our commitment—admittedly unprecedented in Jewish history, and inconceivable in a less wealthy community—to broad-based day school education?  This is not necessary.  We can address the moral issues and, in doing so, the financial issues as well.

The Solomon Schechter School of Greater Boston has proposed a version of a model with great potential.  In very simplified form, here is how it might work:  Tuition is set as either a fixed percentage of income—say, 15 percent, with small adjustments for the number of children in the school—or a relatively high set amount per student, which high-income families can use if they wish to pay a lower percentage of their income.  Families unable to pay even the 15 percent could, as now, apply for financial aid.

This model corrects many of the current system’s moral deficiencies:

• It makes the tuition-setting process transparent and predictable.
• It moves many middle-class families off the rolls of those receiving financial aid.
• It defines day school education as a public good to be communally supported instead of an individual good, privately purchased.
• It makes clear that the rich, even when they pay the maximum tuition, are assessed a lower percentage of their income than the middle class.

There are, of course, gaps and imperfections.  The new system does not (yet) address families with children in multiple schools or questions of what costs should and should not be included in tuition.  It also excludes, consciously, family assets.  Yes, this exclusion could allow families to “cheat” by hiding their true financial capacity; but counting all assets would provide a disincentive to saving—and, equally important, would have critical implications for privacy and dignity.

No system is without drawbacks, but the proposed system’s moral advantages are significant.

Still, let’s be practical: The model will and should be required to pass the budget test.  It should provide our schools with revenues at least equal to those of the present system.  In fact, the new model would meet or exceed the test, if only because the percentage of income required as tuition can be set so as to produce approximately the revenues that schools receive now.

But the new system would have further budget advantages.  Under the current system, schools operate under deeply flawed ideas about their revenues and their communities’ financial capacities.  They have arbitrary “financial aid budgets” for what they consider tuition “subsidies”; they turn down students when these budgets are “spent” and they can no longer “afford” to take students paying less than full tuition.  In fact, however, any student who pays a significant portion of gross family income will be contributing significantly more than the marginal cost of his or her education.  In rejecting such students, schools forego revenues and profits.  Moreover, notes Dan Perla of The AVI CHAI Foundation, if a school sets tuition as a percentage of income during a recession, when costs rise faster than wages, it will realize rising revenues from the same percentage of income when times improve.

In addition, it is wholly reasonable to expect that the new system would change behavior.  Families who do not consider day school under the current system, because of uncertainties or privacy concerns, may well consider it when they know how tuition payments will relate to their income and are required to submit only the first page of their income tax returns.  Families with many children will be more likely to send them to day schools; indeed, such families may grow larger over time.  Wealthier and even middle-class families, who will no longer see their tuition payments as subsidizing their neighbors, may be more likely to donate.  Families without children in the schools may also be more willing to donate if day school costs are presented as a communal obligation, not a commodity for purchase.

This new model requires elaboration and customization, but it can redirect the community’s conversation and efforts toward a model of day school financing that is both financially and morally sustainable.

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper is Dean of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership, the intellectual catalyst of Modern Orthodoxy’s “Taking Responsibility for Torah,” and teaches Rabbinic Literature at Gann Academy, a pluralistic Jewish high school in Waltham, Massachusetts.  Many of his lectures and articles can be found at the Center’s website, www.TorahLeadership.org.

The Solomon Schechter Day School (SSDS) of Greater Boston observed an interesting financial anomaly among the 28 families sending three children to the school (there were no families with more than three children): only one was middle class. By middle class, the school meant families with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) of $200,000-$400,000. The school reached this conclusion through an analysis of its financial aid data and its knowledge of the finances of its full payers.  Where were these “middle income” families? The leadership of the school came to the conclusion that there was a dearth of such large, middle income families due to concerns about cost. With an average gross tuition in excess of $21,000 per child, cost seemed to be an inhibiting factor in the ability of a three child, middle income family to send all of their children to the school.

SSDS of Greater Boston responded to this dilemma by creating a program that provides these middle income families with greater long term predictability on the tuition that they pay. The new program guarantees that they will never pay more than 15% of their AGI in tuition, regardless of family size. Lower income families continue to receive traditional financial aid. With this middle income tuition guarantee, the school expects to improve its retention of middle income families and, over a period of time, grow enrollment.

How much does this program cost and how will SSDS of Greater Boston fund it? The program is estimated to cost no more than $250,000 in the upcoming school year. The school anticipates that they will raise in excess of this amount as a result of a nearly 9% tuition increase among full payers. Taking from the rich and giving to the middle class? No, not really. A careful analysis of the school’s tuition structure revealed that the school was actually subsidizing its full-paying families. The analysis revealed that the true cost to educate a child at the school was about $26,000. Full tuition averaged about $21,000. So the school raised its tuition to $23,000 for the 2012/13 school year. They will consider raising tuition even further toward the goal of ensuring that wealthier families cover the cost of their own child’s education. By the way, even at the higher full tuition rates, a three child family with an AGI of $400,000 or more will never pay more than 17% of their AGI in tuition.

It is interesting to note that the 15% income cap closely mirrors what the school believes it would have charged these families under a traditional financial aid model had the families applied for such aid. They simply weren’t applying. A large, middle income family now knows that they can send all their children to SSDS of Greater Boston for a cost that is the lesser of $23,000 per child (full tuition for the upcoming year) or 15% of their AGI. This provides a middle income family with long term tuition visibility and will allow them to send all of their children to the school. By way of example, a family with a pre-tax income of $300,000 pays about $45,000 in tuition whether they have two children or three children. Looked at from a different perspective, their third child attends the school for free.

Since the program was announced, the school has already seen the number of 3-child families increase by four. Regardless of whether or not the increase was a direct result of the program, foundations like AVI CHAI need to monitor and possibly replicate programs like this for the benefit of middle income families in other day schools and communities. Is your day school underpricing the cost of full tuition? In other words, if every student paid full tuition, would the school cover its budget? Are there large families in your school sending some of their children to free or lower cost schools? Would an income cap program work in your school? If so, what is the right percentage of AGI?

This post is part of a monthly series on day school affordability and sustainability by Dan Perla, AVI CHAI’s program officer for day school finance.

ELI talks: Inspired Jewish Ideas are 10-15 minute talks in which commitments to Jewish literacy, Jewish religious engagement, Jewish peoplehood, and love of Israel are central. ELI talks hope to illuminate these ideas and celebrate expressions and enactments of these commitments. ELI stands for Engagement, Literacy, and Identity.

Here Micah Lapidus, Director of Judaic and Hebrew Studies at the The Alfred and Adele Davis Academy, shares observations following his experience giving an inaugural ELI talk at the North American Day School Conference in Atlanta. He spoke on “The Unbearable Lightness of Judaism,” and you can view his talk here.

First, a definition. ELI Talks = 1 part TED + 1 part Torah. Blend, pour, edit, and produce. Recipe courtesy of The AVI CHAI Foundation.

Second, an anecdote. When I was invited to be part of the inaugural round of ELI Talks at the 2012 North American Jewish Day School Conference I was fairly certain that there had been a mistake. This notion continued to haunt me until I walked off the stage (unsure of what I’d actually said, versus what I’d intended to say).

Third, a related anecdote. Because the Day School Conference was in my hometown of Atlanta, GA I decided to run home to freshen up and collect my thoughts in the hours leading up to my talk. My wife and daughter were out of town, and the promise of a quiet, familiar place seemed a nice alternative to the bustling conference. Refreshed and ready to go I walked out of my house, pulled the door shut, and realized that I’d left my keys inside! Thankfully I had my cell phone and was able to contact the 1 reputable cab company in my area. I arrived back at the conference unscathed but suffered on the back end of things when the locksmith took an extra hour (it was now 1 in the morning) to show up at my home. He was, incidentally, Israeli.

Now that I’ve suffered the agony of watching myself on video and acquired a bit of distance from the ELI Talk experience, a couple of enduring impressions and observations continue to rattle around in my mind.

1.    Patach U’Derash. ELI Talks give presenters a unique and powerful platform to teach. Patach U’Derash (literally, open your mouth and teach) is a Talmudic phrase. The story I associate it with is that of Rabbi Eliezer, who was invited to offer words of Torah in front of teachers that he considered far wiser and more qualified than he (apologies if this is an incorrect citation). If and when you give an ELI Talk, you will definitely feel like Rabbi Eliezer as your audience will surely be the most engaged, thoughtful, and dedicated Jewish educators, leaders, professionals in the area. At best you will be their peer. Rest assured that you will not be wiser or more qualified. I speak from experience. The rationale behind this is that ELI Talks are meant to be a platform for emerging as well as established voices.
2.    Lo ha’Derash ha’Ikar Eleh ha’Maaseh. (“The sermon isn’t what counts, it’s what you do with it.”) One nice thing about ELI Talks is that they aren’t meant to be sermons. For those of us who bring a rabbinic background this is particularly exciting as the genre of the sermon brings with it certain expectations and associations. While ELI Talks are undeniably word-focused events, they are more like “happenings” than they are speeches or sermons. The gathering of minds, the fellowship and community that emerge in the room, represent a powerful force that is, in and of itself, a type of act. In the days when I worked for Yale Hillel I used to pass a bumper sticker on my walk to work that read, “The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another.” ELI Talks have this effect.
3.    Lilmod u’Lelamed. The relevance and dynamism of Judaism are directly proportional to the quality of learning and teaching in which we engage. ELI Talks represent a unique convergence of Jewish learning and teaching in a relevant and engaging format that can command attention in a very noisy world. Speaking personally, I have to say that I feel that I had a chance to both learn and teach at every phase of my ELI Talk experience. From thinking through my ideas, to delivering my remarks, to receiving feedback from teachers, colleagues, and friends (new and old) to hearing the thoughts of the other presenters to thinking about all of these considerations while waiting for locksmith and even now.

To read more from Micah Lapidus, visit his blog at rabbispen.com.

I also see that a reoccurring theme in many of these postings is passion. People feel very strongly about the issue, whether from the perspective of day school leader committed to mission, as community leader concerned about the collective future, or as parents worrying about their children’s preparedness for an uncertain future and/or worried that the parent’s own uncertainty about the education she or he received as a child will be good enough (or perhaps as bad) for her or his own child. We should not ignore the emotional dimension of these issues.

I was teaching a class a few months ago about Migdal Bavel, the Tower of Babel mentioned in the Torah, which according to one school of thought was an example of man’s hubris, his arrogant desire to dominate. I suggested that perhaps that was one of the reasons that our enemies targeted the World Trade Center for they perceived it as our own such tower because it was, for a short period of time, the tallest building in the world. “Really?!” remarked a number of students. “We never knew that it was so tall.”  It was another one of those moments when I was reminded how quickly time flies when teaching high school, how today’s events are tomorrow’s history. I recall the first time it happened years ago when a middle school student asked me which came first, the Six Day War or the Yom Kippur War. My youth became his boring history homework. It’s happened countless times since.

I reflect upon this as we get closer to what some of us refer to as “The Yom’s season” — Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, and Yom Ha`Atzma’ut. These are pivotal days in the Jewish calendar for anyone who is modern Orthodox and hopefully for anyone who is Jewishly committed. They are days which have helped shape us and have irrevocably shaped the identity of the Jewish people. Schools, therefore, make a deal about them, or at least they should.

And yet, commemorating these days is more challenging than one might think. Take Yom HaShoah, for example. Most of us have met survivors even if they are not our grandparents or great grandparents. But for our kids, Yom HaShoah is increasingly a day that we mark an event that happened a long time ago and, dare I say, to someone else. It’s not that they think it’s an irrelevant date, but rather that it’s hard (in the absence of survivors in the family) to connect to in a personal way. May all survivors live to be 120, but the day will one day come when we will no longer be able to invite them to speak at our commemorations. How will we convey the personal stories and the human dimension? How will we get students to truly understand and to feel the importance of these events? How will these days matter? One researcher recently suggested that the role that Holocaust Memorial Day plays in the American civil religion is on the wane and that it could well fade from the communal calendar one day. Even if that does not happen in our community, what will that day and the other “yom’s” mean to our kids?

One way to ensure their importance, I think, is for none of us to take these days for granted with our children. We should not be relying upon schools or community but rather should be using those commemorations to reinforce the teaching that we do at home. And by teaching I mean not history lessons, but rather to convey to our kids with passion and feeling a sense of what these days mean to us, why they move us, what we remember of our own family histories or observances. We want our kids to incorporate these days as part of the narrative of their own lives but they will do so only if we can begin to offer them the narratives of our own lives. Tell them stories, take them to communal events, prepare a special food for Yom Ha`Aztma’ut, tell them why you love Israel or about the Holocaust survivors you have met. Tell them about your family tree and how the Shoah tore away its branches and roots. Tell them about your first time in Israel and what it meant to you or why you keep going back. Tell them about the soldiers who have given up their lives instead of going to college so that we may have the privilege of visiting the country. Share family heirlooms, watch a movie or documentary together, light a candle, or play games in Hebrew. In short, make these days as meaningful, fun/serious and noteworthy as possible. They are the stuff that memories and identity are ultimately made of.

I recently returned from Poland and Israel with a group of almost 70 seniors. As part of a larger course I teach in the weeks preceding the trip, I require that students become more familiar with their family trees. For many, it’s boring stuff–just another homework assignment, but they will at least have spent time with parents or grandparents going over the details and gathering the information. And yet, once we get over there, it all seems to come together. One student was actually able to place a stone on the intact gravesite of his great great grandparents (an extraordinarily unique experience in Eastern Europe) and he and I traipsed all over the Warsaw cemetery finding gravesites of relatives he had heard about and some he did not even know existed. Our sense of discovery was palpable but so too was his sense of pride. We visited an ancestral shtetl of a couple of students and one of them subsequently told me “I have listened to stories of this town all my life but now, just being here, I finally understand.” Or another: “My grandfather always said we should be thankful for Israel. I didn’t always get it. Now I do.” Or another: “I’ve been to Israel many many times, but it feels different this time. I can’t explain it but it just means so much more. I get it now.” Or another: “When you leave Poland, you have a new unspeakable bond with your peers simply because they share your heritage, background, and religion. At that moment, I knew I would always be different as a person, but I also knew I would always be different as a Jew.”

And the list goes on. The point is not alone the power of the trip, for not all students will necessarily have the opportunity. Rather, it was the way in which the trip helped to trigger and reinforce the stories, the memories and the experiences that their parents, grandparents and schools and camps had been inculcating since they were young children. It was one of those moments when it all came together, but it could not have done so as powerfully and as meaningfully had they not been prepped for it by years of nurture.

“Going from Auschwitz to the Kotel,” one participant wrote to me, “I truly feel Hashem watching over us.”  For her, as for so many of us, it was a new perspective on every Yom we had ever celebrated, coming to a place our ancestors had dreamed about, our parents had told us about, our schools and camps had taught us about, a place that we all understood is home. May all of our children feel the same way.

With best wishes for a meaningful and personal Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha`Atmza’ut.

Rabbi Jay Goldmintz, Ed.D., is the Headmaster of Ramaz Upper School.

A traditional Shabbat lunch is usually book-ended by well- established rituals—kiddush and motzei at the beginning of the meal and birkat hamazon at the end of the meal. These days it appears that a new “ritual” is emerging as a focal point for the middle of the meal—the discussion about day school affordability! To aid you in your conversations, here is a brief primer on the financial context in which most Jewish day schools operate.

There appear to be approximately 400 Jewish day schools in North America that can be classified as Community, Orthodox (modern or centrist), Reform or Solomon Schechter (Conservative). Based on data compiled by AVI CHAI in collaboration with YU’s Institute for University-School Partnershipand JData, these 400 schools have approximately 120,000 students in them and have a cumulative operating budget of approximately $2 billion annually. Net tuition (tuition net of scholarships and teacher discounts) typically covers only 75%-80% of the $2.0 billion cumulative budget.

This has led to a systemic underfunding of $400-$500 million annually, absent any fundraising, endowment income, government funding and federation or foundation support.

Of this $400-$500 million of under-funding, approximately half ($250mm) is mitigated through normal fundraising and annual endowment income (primarily the former). Federation and foundation support provides another $100mm, though this support in highly concentrated in cities like Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Los Angeles.

This leaves an overall budgetary shortfall of about $200-$250 million.

It is important to understand that while the vast majority of Jewish day schools face some level of under-funding, the shortfall is highly uneven among individual schools and communities.  Nevertheless, it is still instructive to look at the under-funding on a per school level.  On a per school basis, the funding shortfall boils down to this. Of the average school’s $5 million budget, net tuition typically brings in just $3.75-$4.0 million. A combination of fundraising and endowment income often closes about 50% of the gap. The remaining 50%, or approximately $500k-$600k per school, represents the current funding crisis.

While certain communities of day schools receive per student annual Federation allocations of $500 or more, the vast majority of New York day schools receive only nominal per student allocations from their local Federations.  Similarly, while Jewish day schools in communities such as Philadelphia and Seattle receive significant funding from local foundations such as the Samis and Kohelet Foundations, the vast majority of schools receive very modest sums, if any, from local foundations.

The amount of public funding available for day schools is similarly skewed toward day schools in certain states. While  New York and New Jersey provide mandatory services and other funding which typically amounts to a couple of hundred dollars per student, day schools in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia can receive $1,000 per student or more through a business tax credit program offered by the state of Pennsylvania.

The lack of a homogeneous Jewish day school system suggests that financial interventions will not be in the form of one size fits all. Therefore, understanding the financial context in which day schools operate will ultimately help to determine the different courses of AVI CHAI’s future work in the day school finance arena.  Currently AVI CHAI is considering a series of targeted, contextually-appropriate financial interventions for Jewish day schools.  These may include initiatives around enrollment growth (increased enrollment typically leads to greater financial sustainability), communal funding and middle income affordability/tuition setting.  Much more will be said about these initiatives in future blog posts. For the moment, let’s hope this primer on day school finance will aid the discourse around the Shabbat lunch table.

This is the first of a series of monthly articles on day school affordability and sustainability by Dan Perla, AVI CHAI’s program officer for day school finance.

by Yossi Prager

Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” Should philanthropy be the same?

AVI CHAI’s spend-down goals include building funding partnerships with others whose values and interests align with ours. I have therefore had the privilege of meeting with and learning from impressive and dedicated Jewish philanthropists across the country. Time and again, I have learned that most funders focus their Jewish philanthropy overwhelmingly on local community-based institutions. As this theme repeated itself, I thought of the verse in Deuteronomy 15:7, “If there be among you a needy man, one of your brethren, within any of your gates, in the land which the LORD your God gives you. …” The Talmud proves from this verse that local needs draw first priority on charity dollars, making the focus of the philanthropists I met not only sensible but steeped in Jewish values.

However, as I reflected further, I came to believe that an exclusive focus on funding local institutions is ultimately counterproductive toward the goal of meeting local needs. This is particularly the case when local funders fail to recognize strong national organizations or programs that produce the staffing, training, curricula and thought leadership to support local efforts.

As I project forward, I worry that an overly local focus will make centralized projects unsustainable, to the detriment of local communities nationwide. To flesh out my concern, here are a few examples of functions that I believe are best addressed nationally for the benefit of local institutions. I draw from our grantees in the fields of day schools and summer camps because I know them best.

1. Training Principals and Camp Directors – Lay people at day schools and camps recognize the need for their CEOs to be trained in education, business, administration, lay board interaction and, even more, for the CEOs to figure out how to integrate Judaism, education and leadership into a seamless package. It would be incredibly inefficient for each local community to independently develop training programs, and they don’t have to because national institutions such as JTS, Torah Umesorah and the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) offer terrific programs for these purposes.

At times, a day school or a camp may hire a CEO who, notwithstanding other stellar qualities, has a limited Jewish educational background. These CEOs need something different: a Jewish education of their own. Again, national institutions such as RAVSAK and the Jewish Community Center Association offer programs to fill this local need.

2. Curricular programs – The Tal Am integrated Jewish studies/Hebrew language program began as a project of the BJE in Montreal over 30 years ago. It is now an independent organization whose materials are used annually in grades 1-5 by over 30,000 students in 325 Jewish schools across the world. The NETA Hebrew language program for middle and high school is now used globally by 15,000 students each year. Local schools simply would not have access to these high quality materials without the (inter)national effort to create them. These curricula now need to be refreshed and redesigned for the 21st Century digital world so that local schools can continue to benefit.

3. Capacity Building toward financial sustainability or endowment building – As the reverberations of the 2008 financial crisis continue, and our community adjusts to the “new normal,” virtually all have recognized the need to financially re-engineer our institutions and develop new sources of revenue (including through alumni programming and endowments). The social media culture has generated challenges and opportunities – and, for sure, new ways to think about fundraising. Jewish institutions need easy access to information, training, networks and models that they can apply to their situations. Institutions such as PEJE, FJC, the Grinspoon Institute of Jewish Philanthropy and Yeshiva University have been providing national programs to address local problems. To be sure, there are no silver bullets, but many local schools and camps would be financially weaker without the support of these national organizations.

These are just a few of many examples. Another occurs to me as I write this post for eJewish Philanthropy: Dan Brown, publisher of eJewish Philanthropy, generates real value for the Jewish philanthropy and non-profit fields, both national and local, yet the blog has no built-in local funding base.

If you accept the premise that there are local needs that can best be provided nationally, how should they be financially sustained? The prevailing myth seems to be that there is a sufficiently large number of “national” foundations such as Schusterman, Jim Joseph, Marcus, Weinberg, Bronfman, Steinhardt, Wexner, AVI CHAI and others with almost infinite capacity to generate and sustain necessary national programming. As an insider to this group, I know that it just ain’t so. There are relatively few foundations funding in any single Jewish field, and their cumulative annual spending is far inadequate to the needs. Also, national funders are only able to continue initiating new programs by exiting other programs over time, meaning that national funding provides a temporary lift, not a permanent answer. If you don’t believe me, ask any non-profit leader of a national institution.

So where does that leave needed national programs and institutions?

This is a pressing question for all Jewish philanthropists, local and national. I believe that those of us involved at the national level need to do a better job explaining the realities to the wealthiest local donors, who have the capacity to bring their human and financial resources to national efforts. I know that some local institutions fear that fundraising for national efforts will attract away money that would otherwise have gone to them. My own experience suggests otherwise: that the wealthy become more committed to their local organizations through their experience with national programs that benefit their communities.

This question I have raised is tied to one that has been broadly written about since the closure of JDub: how can innovative new organizations be sustained beyond their start- up phase? The JDub question is really a broader one, relating to all organizations or programs that don’t have a natural geographic constituency. How will they grow, thrive and serve our communities?

I look forward to the conversation.

Yossi Prager is the Executive Director-North America of The AVI CHAI Foundation.

“Providing outstanding education to Jewish families and partnering with them in that way is a beautiful extension of our work,” said Arnold Zar-Kessler, Head of School.

In November 2010 SSDSGB hired Ellen Agulnick as the early childhood program director based on her extensive track record of starting preschools and prior successes in building community. At that time, it was too late for the program to open in September 2010 so Ellen was hired for one year, taking the risk that in that time she could effectively market, enroll, and build the school to open in September 2011. If there weren’t at least 24 children enrolled by mid-February, the school would not go forward.

In February of 2011, 55 of 56 spots were filled. “There was a period of time where it really took off and it was quite exciting and remarkable,” said Amy Kruglak, a school board member. Especially remarkable was the fact that the classes were filled with not one teacher hired or one classroom set up. By the time the school did open in 2011, the classes were filled, some with waiting lists.

The early childhood program’s accomplishments have been quite impressive and registration for fall 2012 is full with waiting lists in each classroom.  Of 17 children in the oldest classroom, 14 have applied to the Schechter pre-school. Kruglak attributes the success to several factors:

• The school administration and volunteer leadership has worked very intentionally throughout the year to create linkages between the early childhood program and the K through 8 program.
• Efforts to help parents feel part of a community. “If someone dies or a baby is born, the Schechter chessed community reached out,” she explained.
• When a child’s friends were all going to kindergarten at Schechter, it created a group dynamic which encouraged others to make the decision as well. “If you intentionally build the preschool as part of the school, it will bring in families who haven’t previously considered it as an option,” said Kruglak.
• The difference between the cost of full-time day care and Jewish day school is not that great, creating a more natural financial transition.

Here are some lessons learned from this school’s experience:

1. Professional leadership: Things fall into place much better with an outstanding leader to take on the responsibilities, in this case Ellen.
2. Lay leadership: The championing of the cause by a volunteer trustee –Amy Kruglak – had a critical impact on the preschool’s success.
3. Institutions have to be prepared to see themselves in an entrepreneurial role. “Independent schools have to recognize that in order to remain active players they have to think in an entrepreneurial sense and take risks… In your own business, you’d be able to take calculated risks, so why not in our institutions?” said Zar-Kessler.
4. Gauge the readiness of your community. Kruglak and Zar-Kessler feel that it cannot be a one-size-fits-all model – schools need to research other options that exist and how they can best service their communities.

   These lessons – highlighting the role of entrepreneurship, leadership, and community-based work which SSDSGB’s early childhood program embody – may well be meaningful for others to consider in efforts to further enrollment and engagement in Jewish day school education.

One theme running through the winners’ responses relates to the power of networking. The schools found that a combination of in-person, word-of-mouth, and social media networking to constituents (and being creative about who those constituents may be) leads to great impact regardless of a school’s physical size. It also provides new ways to engage and strengthen that community.

First Place: Columbus Torah Academy
Second Place: Lander~Grinspoon Academy
Third Place: The Greenfield Hebrew Academy

Columbus Torah Academy in Columbus, OH

Our Strategy

The video produced in our Film Studies class, “If a Picture is Worth A Thousand Words,” which won first place in the public voting, had a few goals:

1.    To be unique. We have made our share of the typical, one-shot, talking-head kind of promos, and those are vital to the marketing of our school.  But considering we wanted to “go viral,” we needed an approach that would create a product our viewers and consumers would be inclined to not only “like” on Facebook, but actually be compelled to recommend others view.
2.    To reveal genuinely positive images through video and music. Our favorite videos in the contest were ones in which that positive vibe comes across.
3.    To highlight specific achievements or areas of strength. I thought all the videos did a great job focusing on the excellent academic, religious, and extracurricular programs of Jewish day schools. Small class sizes, personal attention, and a community approach are all great parts of the message of day schools everywhere.

Getting the Word Out

Even though didn’t think we stood a chance against other bigger schools with a much bigger reach, we kept plugging the contest on our announcements as well as on our weekly newsletter and emailer. Sustaining word-of-mouth enthusiasm from teachers, students, and administrators even in a small school led to the networking of families in the entire day school community nationwide.

On Facebook, we tagged every alum we could find, because, technically, each appears in the video. Each week throughout the contest we created Facebook Events, which prompted all our viewers to watch and rate videos, as well as gave them a deadline to do so. Maybe being prompted to participate again and again got a little annoying to some, but in the end that’s what not only got people to rate (instead of just “like”), but also expanded our reach to other networks. By the end of the contest, we were getting positive replies from Africa and Europe. Since the contest, our Facebook page membership has shot up significantly.

Networking Lessons

The contest has shown us that a campaign coordinated among the various message outlets combined with a program you believe can reach much farther than we thought possible. We had always seen social media as the visible part of the iceberg of publicity. We learned that a little bit of organization and collaboration does indeed go a long way.

Furthermore, the entire campaign, from word of mouth to the internet, has strengthened our community. Networking has both reconnected many of those with whom we’ve lost contact and has strengthened the connection of those active within the community. Every student in the Film Studies class is indeed proud of their accomplishment, but so too are all those students, parents, teachers, and alumni who participated in the contest and made a difference.

Lander~Grinspoon Academy in Northampton, MA

How did Lander~Grinspoon Academy, a school in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts with just 95 students, win second place for the popular vote in the Day School Video Academy contest? How did we beat out much larger schools in much, much larger communities? It was partly about the product. A group of committed community members produced a stunning video that told a compelling story about our school. It captured the essence of who we are and what makes LGA so special.

But the other part was that we used all of our resources to get the word out about the contest. Once the video was produced and submitted into the contest, another team of people went into action, promoting our video at every turn. Our admissions director, who is active in the local Chamber of Commerce, used her networks to promote the video. We asked parents, alumni, and current students to send out the video to everyone they knew. We used social media – in our community, the Jewish day schools have a combined presence on Facebook.  Practically every Jew in the Pioneer Valley (and a lot of non-Jews as well) knew that LGA was participating in this contest.

But we went a step beyond that and got really creative. I had lunch with a number of colleagues from the non-Jewish independent schools and asked them to promote the video in their faculty communities. One of our sister schools even sent it to all their families! Our Federation director wrote her weekly message about it. The synagogues in the community put an attachment in their e-messaging. We learned that our network is greater than we think — which felt good.

This past summer, LGA launched a very successful micro-philanthropy campaign called Double Chai. We were looking to expand our donor base by asking 1,818 to donate $36 each. While we didn’t reach our donor number, we raised our goal, which was more than $65,000. This time, we went back to each donor and asked them to vote for our video. It felt right to reach out and show them what their money was going toward. We are continuing to build momentum, reaching out to segments of the population who didn’t fully understand what we were about. That feels REALLY good!

The Greenfield Hebrew Academy in Atlanta, GA

GHA is excited to have placed third in the public voting track of the AVI CHAI Day School Video competition, with a video created by an 8th-grade student, Nicole Nooriel.
We advertised a page we created listing the videos we had entered into the competition in all our outgoing emails, including our weekly N2K (Need2Know) to our parents and a bi-weekly Divrei GHA to a much larger group in the community, and also on our Facebook pages.

A frustration with the competition was that there was no indication of how we were doing in numbers of votes, so we could not be responsive or generate excitement. We had no idea if our digital strategy was working.

However, we could keep better track of our votes by asking people to vote in person in the school building. Re-focusing our strategy in this way was really fortuitous because during the time frame for the competition we had some of the busiest foot traffic of the year in our building. We hosted the North Atlanta Jewish Students Technology Fair; we held our Parent Teacher Conferences, where we had almost every family in the building; and we had the 4 performances of our annual school musical, “Beauty and the Beast Jr.” In addition, we walked the carpool lines asking people to vote; we had room parents email parents; we added a voting reminder to our reader boards; and we had our front office ask/remind everyone who came into the building to vote for us on laptops we put throughout the building.

GHA has some experience in this type of competition having entered (and won) the “Our School Needs” competition held by Microsoft Bing. That was much more time consuming because people had to vote for our entry every day, and we had to strike a careful balance between reminders and flooding email boxes with requests. The lesson we learned from that contest and from the AVI CHAI competition is that a good mix of digital and in-person nudging seems to work best.

The innovative conference structure took the traditional conference phenomenon of so many productive conversations taking place in the hallways outside sessions and made those hallway conversations the substance of the program. Participants crowd-sourced over 600 session ideas, culled down to 43 open-source sessions on the topics that the participants themselves wanted to talk about, from “Making the Case: Selling Jewish Camp to Parents” to “To Plug In or Not to Plug In: Thinking about Technology at Camp” and “Keeping Up With the Changing Face of the Jewish World.”

During those breaks and hallway time, I took the opportunity to ask camp directors and other stakeholders for their personal reflections on the overall conference theme of “Reach Beyond the Bunk.” Whether reaching constituencies besides campers, such as parents and alumni; extending camp programming beyond the summer months; or increasing and enhancing opportunities for Jewish education and identity-building, a multitude of ways to reach beyond the bunk were shared. Here are a few:

• Employ Technology to Further Customer Service: Make an app that helps parents register, pack, and access information and updates – Stefan Teodosic, Camp Beber

•  Break Down Community Silos: Through “horizontal programming” during the course of the year – events tied to synagogues and other community institutions such as father/son and mother/daughter weekends – Jerry Kaye, URJ Camp OSRUI

• Online classes: Connecting young adults around the country – Talia Spear and Kali Silverman, Habonim Dror

• Provide Social Action Opportunities: Partner with Jewish organizations to do social action work during the summer – Alan Friedman, Camp Mountain Chai

• Year-round Israel Education: Take successful Israeli leaders who have been at camp to live in the community as full-time shlichim at synagogues, youth groups, college campuses, leveraging relationships they already have through camp – Bobby Harris, URJ Camp Coleman

View more views from Leaders Assembly on AVI CHAI’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/AVICHAINA.