Admission Cards

Tell me a yeshiva that doesn’t do it.

How is it “stolen”?

As someone whose children have been out of yeshiva for decades and handled tuition by just write check….
Please explain what an admission card is, and why it might be stealing?
Thanks

An admission card is issued when all past tuition debts owed are paid. A student will not be admitted to class at the beginning of the year without this card. I imagine the problem is that according to Halacha, you are not allowed to refuse admission to cheder when parents are unable to pay. The community is supposed to force the rich people to pay for the education of the poor people. (Ramah in Choshain Mishpat (163:3)) With the tuition card system, a poor person who may not be obligated to pay according to Halacha, is forced to pay, which is akin to stealing the money from them. I imagine.

#1 it is none of the classroom teacher’s business to know which children have parents who owed money. A wll known girls yeshiva withholds the report card if parents owe tuition. Teacher tells the student the envelope is empty “ask your parents why?
#2 at the end of the school year, the scholarship committee and the administrator would have a meeting and go over the amounts still owing (without names revealed). If there was enough funds in the scholarship savings account, money would be transferred to the operating budget to clear all balances. (Not in Brooklyn. They know names and amounts.
#3 The HEAVY HITTERS would be asked to cover the debt, so every family started the year fresh after summer break. In Brooklyn, the hanhalah holds back the registration packet until the balance is paid (or a payment plan is agreed upon).

Undercove,

I ask my question again…

My understanding is that an admission card is given to parents when their past accounts are settled.

Can you please tell us ( a ) if I am wrong (and if so, how), or ( b ) why using this process to ensure the yeshiva receives monies it is entitled to results in the money being stolen?

Can you please answer?

Thank you.

The Wolf

@ZD
I am dead set against them, But in the USA School vouchers are the answer to the problem.
Low income frum families with many children cannot afford to pay sufficient tuition to run the schools.

Why am I against school vouchers?
#1 I don’t believe in tax dollars funding private institutions
#2 Separation of church and state
#3 Remember the uproar when NYS attempted to set standards and requirements in yeshiva teaching? If yeshivas and day schools take government money (vouchers) regulations and requirements will rear their heads

Undercove,

I’m still waiting for an answer to my question. The fact that you are not answering leads me to believe that you don’t have an answer.

The Wolf

Rebyid23
If a parent sends a kid to the grocery store after the owner told the parents their credit is too overdrawn and he can’t extend anymore credit, is the grocer wrong for not allowing the child to go home with the groceries?

KY: The grocery will not make a loud announcement that other customers will become privy to.

If it’s the wrong thing to do, it doesn’t become okay just because they gave a warning.

The reason I only rescind my previous posts but do not switch my opinion, is because one can differentiate that there it was just hate /spite whereas here it is with just cause. However I’m not certain which way to go

The teachers of the school don’t have the option of NOT paying their rent or utility bills. If parents don’t pay their tuition, teachers and lower salaried workers in the school don’t get paid. If parents are having difficulty paying their tuition bills, they should not project their problems on to the school’s employees and the parent of other children who have worked hard to pay their tuition (sometimes holding a second job or foregoing items the non-paying parents may enjoy). If you cannot pay the bill, either find some mosdos or wealthy baal tzadakah who will pay your kids’ tuition, or send them to a public school and tutor them at home in limudei kodesh but you have no right to impose your economic problems on innocent third-parties. At the same time, as others have noted, the schools should be firm but seek every possible means to avoid embarrassing the innocent children who get caught up in these disputes.

It is possible that Undercove is referring to a specific situation in a specific Yeshiva that may in fact be doing something incorrect. But his generalization “Any Yehiva…” is then mis-applied.

Even his subsequent explanation was rather incredulous. I can’t imagine any Yeshiva that admits people without making any financial arrangements at the beginning of the year. So if the parent are in financial hardship and have in fact ‘paid all they can’, how does that compare with whatever arrangement they agreed to with the Yeshiva? Did they lie to the Yeshiva and agree to pay an amount that they had no intention of honoring?

Or perhaps they encountered a financial hardship later in the year, and now cannot pay what they agreed to? In that case, they should contact the Yeshiva and renegotiate the terms.

Although there are surely many exceptions, all of the Yeshivas, Schools, and Camps that I have dealt with in my 25 years as a parent of seven children have been run by decent humans who may have a tough policy but ultimately will negotiate if there is a legitimate need.

The only Admission Cards I have ever heard of were included or referred to in the initial Admission process for the first day of the school year. Some schools don’t have the ‘Admission Card’ policy at all. Some reference it but never ask for them on the first day. And most important of all – some schools have them, BUT if you call them and make proper arrangements, whether your balance is paid up or not, they will agree to send them to you. They have no interest in actually following up their threat. All they want if you to make arrangements or discuss your balance.

If the parent doesn’t have money to pay off the balance in the beginning of the year and is refused an admission card, the child will either be embarrassed when the school embarrasses him on the first day for not having a card or alternatively by him not having a school to go to.

Relying on “heavy hitters” to make up the shortfall runs into the main difficulty inherent in all redistribution schemes. To quote Margaret Thatcher, “Sooner or later you run out of Other People’s Money”.
IMO, the main problem is that each school is a separate fiefdom to itself and is often run as a business that relies on tuition and donations to pay its expenses and provide livelihoods for their owners. There is no central Board of Ed that runs all the local schools a public enterprise. An example of this organization is, l’havdil, the Catholic school system where all the schools in the Diocese are run by Diocesan board and supported by general funds.
What needs to happen is:
1. Consolidation: Instead of 5 schools with 150 enrollment, why not one school with 600 enrollment? Yeah, I know that there may be differences in hashkofah but so what! Torah is the same for everyone and as are secular studies.
2. Centralization: All schools the area should be under one administration. Which receives funds and distributes them. (N.B. This already works in homogeneous communities like KJ and New Square. The problem is to get folks to disregard a little of their personal hashkofos for the greater good.)
3. Funding: While, as CTL so cogently points out, government money comes with a lot of baggage, there is no reason that schools should not accept Jewish money. That means that the schools need to just bite the bullet and join Federation.

I have said the same as Redleg. Find a way to rent a larger building, and put one school in each wing or each floor. They could split rent and utilities.

When parents don’t pay, they shouldn’t embarrass the kids. Let all children to take the test, and hand out all envelopes at the end, with either an admission card or a bill. Split children into various rooms, some that have testing and some don’t, so that kids aren’t noticing everyone who isn’t there).

I don’t blame the schools. They run a tight budget, and need every penny that the parents agreed to. When they don’t receive it, hard working teachers can’t get paid (risk losing their home/ car/ children’s tuition), and eventually the school may fold. 2 schools in Lakewood recently closed for funding issues. This didn’t just hurt the families who couldn’t pay. Now the families that paid full tuition are scrambling to get their daughters into a new school, teachers are looking for new jobs, etc.

If you couldn’t pay rent or a car payment, they would take away your home/ car. If you were to eat groceries or put on store clothes and not pay when you leave, it’s stealing. And it’s hard, because if you sit down and add up the cost of rent with utilities, food, car/ bus, expenses (clothes/ medical), and 4 tuitions, you’ll realize that it’s unaffordable, but your child can’t be uneducated because of that. And too much has to change for people to fix the system.

Is there a citation for the remark by Reb Moshe Feinstein ZT”L? I am curious what the details of this situation were, and the degree to which he intended this comment to be general.

Now to my comments.

Every yeshiva will have its own formula for its income, tuition, government funds, charitable funds, etc. What works for one may not be the same for another. Yeshivos establish their tuition scales based on the degree of dependence they carry on tuition for their income and operations. To the best we can tell, yeshivos, at least a majority, operate in the red, and struggle with many of their expenses. Some prioritize salaries for faculty, others do not. And most rebbeim and teachers are seriously underpaid. Periodically, the faculty that is behind on receiving paychecks make enough noise to compel the administration to take extra steps to insure they get paid. This is common, and not fun for anyone. Just how many online campaigns for yeshivos did you receive requests and donated? So the lack of adequate funding is pretty much standard.

Now the rub. Fund raising is a gamble, and some do it well, others less so. If there is already a commitment for someone to pay, it stands to reason that this debt should be paid. As earlier comments noted, it is usually the parents that have less and are already struggling themselves that bear the brunt of this pressure. And the only force the yeshivos know is to block entry to the kids. That’s their clout. I think this is cruel and unusual punishment, directed at a purely innocent child, and extremely destructive. The absence from yeshiva is nasty, the shame heaped on children is tantamount to murder, and the whole campaign is ill conceived. Yeshivos do it because they can, not because it’s right or moral.

My income was seasonal, and I had agreements with the administration before the school year that I would not be subjected to this strong arm tactic. And the schools were never without a fully paid balance by year’s end. But they had lied, and did it anyway. This required me to take time off work. No phone calls helped. And even really small outstanding balances prompted the same treatment, as if the greed for the few dollars owed was a valuable lesson for the school.

I suggest that some creative minds propose methods that are better routed in morality, better conceived to avoid use of shame, better focused on the use of education rather than the blockade, that can enable yeshivos to manage their finances without the need to bully parents. I don’t have the answers. I just know that this method is unacceptable.

Let’s see: The goyim make sure every child gets into a school, irregardless of the parents income or ability to pay, The parents have zero income and pay zero in taxes — no worry, all their children get into school for free. The parents are illegal aliens and don’t even belong in the country? Still no problem, their children get a free education in school even though their parents pay zip.

But some “yeshivos” throw out Yiddishe kinder into the street or into public school because their parents can’t afford to pay? Even if their parents can afford to pay a dime!

So who is better — the pruste goyim or the administrators of those “yeshivos” that throw Yiddishe kinder into the street because their parents are poor?

Lets see: The Public school system has unlimited funding via tax payer dollars. So yes, they can afford to accept a child with no thoughts about the cost involved. Private schools (Jewish/Christian/Islamic/Non- religious) aren’t funded by the tax payers and thus have a limited budget and at the end of the day have to meet payroll, pay the bills and all other expenses that come with running a school. Your comparison between Yeshiva administrators and Public School administrators is (not surprisingly) appalling and dishonest.

As an aside, many illegal immigrants (estimated by Congressional Budget Office at 50-75%) pay Federal/State/local taxes, and all of them pay taxes like sales tax. I’m not saying the taxes they pay into the system offsets what they take out, but saying they “pay zip” isn’t completely true either.

@Yitzyk
I apologize for this late reply, but have had a client trial the past 2 weeks and little time for diversion.
Yes, I was able to pay my children’s tuition, by hard work and sacrificing other things. My kids and grandkids didn’t/don’t go to summer camp, they spend the summer here under family supervision at a much lower cost.
I was part of the movecause of ment to get out local day schools/yeshivas made constituent agencies of Federation for funding purposes. It also allows the Jewish Family Service to do the scholarship screening and tuition determination. This keeps all private information truly private and real professionals determine need.
In the late 1970s I spearheaded a major area fundraising campaign to guaranty no Jewish child would be turned away from the local school because of tuition needs. We raised more than $5Million from the greater community for an endowment. The endowment is managed by professionals of the local Jewish Foundation. No yeshiva administration can dip into the scholarship endowment for operational funds or to fix a leaky roof.
We have convinced local institutions to share costs and purchasing. The Chabad school and the Schechter school made a combined deal for computers and science lab equipment at a much lower cost than either could get alone.
We established a committee of professionals to write grant applications for funding from many private corporations. Most yeshivos don’t think the Fortune 500 Goyische companies are a funding source, but they are.
My youngest graduated high school years ago, but that did not stop my commitment to raise and give tuition assistance funds. There are many like me here OOT who are willing to work with the non-Frum community to assure Jewish education. I don’t see this cooperation in town.

As for your last request for donations to a specific yeshiva, let me tell you about the fundraising system in place in our area day schools for at least 35 years. In addition to tuition, each family is required to fundraise XXX dollars per year (selling raffle tickets, etc) OR write a check in that xxx amount. Those who can afford to write a check do so, others work hard to raise the charity funds. The schools also give x dollars credit for those who volunteer at school events, etc. It is not unusual to see grandmothers helping in the cafeteria every day. They get the benefit of being out of the house with young people and while not paid, the value of their time counts towards a family’s obligation.
What could you offer the school to offset some tuition and save them on expenses? You need to be creative in your approach. One of my neighbors had his teenage boys cut the Day school lawn and plowed snow in exchange for a needed tuition break

AJ: You’re wrong. Yeshivas receive donations from benefactors who have no children in the Yeshiva.

Your last sentence is exactly the attitude I wrote against in my last comment. Every Yiddishe child must be accepted by a Yeshiva. EVEN if the child’s parents are dirt poor and cannot pay a penny and cannot raise sufficient funds.