School Change

While we in Klal continue to debate the high price of a yeshiva education, others here in the US frame that education debate in other terms: should the US be on a year round educational calendar.

Our standard calendar--September through June--is traditionally thought of as having been put into place when our country was a more agrarian one. Children were needed as help during the productive growing months. There is a flaw with this, however; huge swathes of our population lived in cities, in urban environments, and there wasn't any farming going on in those areas. So why did we have the long summer vacation from school?

Frederick Hess, in a WashingtonPost.com article, gives some reasons. "Summer vacation once made good sense -- back when we lived in a brawn-based economy, academic achievement
mattered less, an absence of air conditioning or modern hygiene turned crowded schools into health risks, and children had moms who were home every day.

Historian Kenneth Gold has noted that summer vacation, as we know it, was an invention of the mid-19th-century belief that "too much schooling impaired a child's and a teacher's health." Community leaders fretted that summer was a "period of epidemics, and most fruitful of diseases generally," and sought to keep children at home or send them to
the countryside.

In that era, the nation's first professional educators believed that too much schooling would exhaust both teacher and student. They thought that placid summers under parental supervision would be more beneficial than time spent in humid, crowded schools. " http://www.nayre.org/Frederick%20Hess.pdf

At present there are some two million students across 46 states that are on a YRE program--year round education. This represents about 5% of all K-12 students in the US. To my knowledge, with the exception of yeshivas of higher education (batei medrash and kollelim), there is no yeshiva that is on the YRE system. So, would there be an advantage for parents if yeshivas went to a YRE system?

First, let's look at the cost. For families where both parents work some type of summer program is a necessity, not a luxury. Someone has to have the care of those children when the parents are not home. For some parents this translates into day camp plus a care provider in the home until the parents return--cost of camp plus the cost of after camp provider. For other parents this translates into sleep away camp. The cost of day camp is highly variable; the cost of sleep away camp pretty much falls into the $3-4K range.

Now look at yeshiva school tuitions. The cost of tuition falls into the range of $10-15K per child per year, with outliers on either end. Using the $15K figure, this is $1500 per month of the 10-month school calendar year. Go to YRE and you would add $3K for the additional two months of school. That $3K is pretty much the cost of either the day camp/home provider expense or the sleep away camp expense. In other words, that YRE calendar should not really cost more than it already costs working parents who must provide childcare during the summer months, whether at some type of camp or in-home.

On the negative side, older high school children in YRE would lose the chance to make money over the summer by working in summer camps or at other jobs. In addition, those parents whose children go to summer camp now would find their summer budgets having to expand to include the cost of food for children who would now be home, for entertainment expenses when not in school, for added electricity expenses for running air conditioning in bedrooms that would be occupied for over the summer, adding back in laundry expenses that aren't there when kids are in camp etc..

There's also this: Some families do not have working mothers, and children, particularly young children, are cared for at home by the mother, with no camp being used, either by choice or by not being able to afford camps. Some parents simply cannot meet the costs of a yeshiva education as it is formulated right now. Add $3K more to the bill for YRE and you might be providing the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back--you will be pricing these parents completely out of providing a yeshiva education. The only way such parents could hope to send their children to yeshiva would be with a hefty tuition reduction. And just where would yeshivas get the additional monies needed to provide such tuition reductions? They are in trouble now, with only a 10-month schedule, in trying to make up the deficit created by numerous parents on scholarships (in addition to poor management, excessive spending etc.).

YRE comes up every year in virtually every state. Slowly many municipalities are adding YRE schools. In addition, a high percentage of schools on YRE are charter or private schools. Many whose job it is to forecast such trends believe that YRE is where our educational system has to be heading. Would there be any benefit to Klal in adding discussion of YRE? Would YRE offer any pluses to yeshiva parents or would there be more minuses? And if YRE is where education is heading in this country then what changes are going to have to be made to the tuition structure to allow yeshiva parents to be able to pay for this education?