He’atid, JEFG receive grants

Two local institutions have been awarded grants from the Orthodox Union as part of the organization’s day school affordability initiative.

Yeshivat He’atid, which is scheduled to open next year in Bergenfield, is among seven projects receiving a challenge grant. The winners were announced Monday at the end of a two-day “Summit on the Affordability of Jewish Education” arranged by the OU that was held in Woodcliff Lake.

The summit brought together 150 lay and professional day school leaders, communal rabbis, and leaders of foundations, federations, and others who are affiliated with more than 80 institutions primarily across the spectrum of Orthodoxy.

“We were heartened to see the depth of commitment and breadth of creativity being applied to the issue of educational affordability,” stated Yehuda Neuberger, chairman of the OU’s Tuition Affordability Task Force. “At the end of the day, day school affordability will be best addressed by multiple parallel efforts that create a variety of revenue growth and expense reduction opportunities. We hope that these grants will result in communal learning and in the replication of successful strategies on a national level.”

In addition to the grants, the Orthodox Union announced a one-time gift to support the Jewish Education for Generations (JEFG) campaign in Bergen County.

The JEFG campaign has three primary goals: to change the current day school economic model, which places almost the entire financial burden on parents, shifting at least some of it onto the broader community; to develop private and public funding sources for day schools; and to find ways that day schools in the area, regardless of affiliation, can work together to achieve economies in scale and share best practices to the benefit of all.

According to Rabbi Judah Isaacs, director of the OU Community Engagement Department, which administers the grant program, “This award is in recognition of the pioneering effort made by JEFG to galvanize community support for all of the day schools in Bergen County.”

The grant to Yeshiva He’Atid will be targeted toward the creation of a Judaic curriculum for kindergarten through second grade for “blended learning,” meaning the use of both computer-assisted and teacher-assisted instruction. “Blended learning” is at the heart of the anticipated school’s goal of offering a lower tuition-higher technology day school alternative.

The other winning grants include:

• Project Education Tuition Affordability Campaign, Project Education Council, Brooklyn. The OU will fund program development and marketing for the campaign to change the culture of giving within the Sephardic (mainly Syrian) community in Brooklyn, resulting in more dollars staying within the community for Jewish education.

• Corporate Citizenship, Denver Academy of Torah, Denver. The OU’s funds will be used to match a foundation grant for website development and graphic design of the Corporate Citizenship program. In this program, participating businesses would give five percent of what they earn through the website to the Denver Academy of Torah. This initiative expands the traditional scrip program to businesses not normally associated with such efforts.

• Hillel Without Borders, The Samuel Scheck Hillel Community Day School, North Miami Beach, Fla. One way to spark community involvement in a school is to get community members to see the school as important to their own lives. Hillel Without Borders hopes to achieve that by creating afterschool programs and adult education opportunities at the school.

• Edollars, Yeshiva Schools of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. The Pittsburgh schools sponsor a “timebanx” program, which allows parents to receive dollar-for-dollar tuition reductions for substantive volunteer work. Schools “can save up to $250,000 in expenses per year in payroll areas such as the IT department, substitute teachers, lunch monitors, landscaping, building maintenance, administrative assistants, etc.,” according to the grant application. It added that the program “has the direct dollar value of $50-$100 per hour. Parents earning that amount are receiving its exact value in exchange for tuition costs.” The OU grant will be used to make improvements to the program that would make it attractive enough for other schools to adapt.

• The National Jewish Cooperative Day School Project, The Jewish Cooperative School, Hollywood, Fla. The OU grant will fund production of an online “Jewish Cooperative Day School Handbook” that will assist parents across the country to form and manage their own cooperative day school, “in which parents are required to bear the burdens of a school’s costs collectively and directly,” the grant application explains. The handbook can also be used by existing day schools that want to increase parent participation.

• The Online Resource Room, Scranton Hebrew Day School, Scranton, Pa. As if day school tuition is not high enough, it is even more of a burden when it comes to special needs children. The OU will provide funding for eight students in four day schools for six months to test both the educational and financial efficacy of distance learning for special needs youngsters. “We want to monitor the children to see if distance learning results in cost savings for the schools while meeting the needs of its students,” said Isaacs, the OU’s grant program’s administrator. The program began as a pilot project last year at the Scranton Hebrew Day School, in which its resource room director studied “with six students across the country online in their homes, as well as in school. In each live session,” the director “was able to replicate the quality and interactive techniques” used in the school’s resource room.