Let’s Register Our Children To Public School

Maybe I should take my kids to the beach in the summer
Or give them cigarettes
Or a gun
I can keep on going on

Do you realize what one day of public school will do to a טהור נשמה?

We’ve had this discussion before. It would not work. Search the archives for it.

The Wolf

Yeshivas should have their own secular education so they can control what to teach, otherwise you are right the government will force us to attend public schools.

Amil: It sure would result in a positive outcome if the threat was real and doable.

Wolfish

Can’t find it. Can you post link?

Wolfish

Can’t find it. Can you post link?

If you go tot the search bar above and search “public school wolf” (without the quotation marks) you’ll find a bunch of the threads. Nonetheless, I’ll summarize the gist of it here.

It has been proposed before that frum Jews should all enroll their kids in public school at the same time. The idea is that the public schools would not be able to handle the influx of so many kids at once and, as a result, the board of Ed will be forced to fund at least the secular portion (if not the entire day) of yeshiva.

There are several problems with this idea:

1. There is a portion of the New York State Constitution (Article XI) which reads (in part):

§3. Neither the state nor any subdivision thereof, shall use its property or credit or any public money, or authorize or permit either to be used, directly or indirectly, in aid or maintenance, other than for examination or inspection, of any school or institution of learning wholly or in part under the control or direction of any religious denomination, or in which any denominational tenet or doctrine is taught, but the legislature may provide for the transportation of children to and from any school or institution of learning.

This is the major obstacle to having state funds used for yeshiva education in New York State. Under the state constitution, no state funding (aside from a few specified services) can be used for schools that teach religion or are under the control of a religious organization.

So, that being said, if everyone were to show up at the doors of their public schools tomorrow with their kids, the state won’t just throw up its hands in surrender and send everyone back to yeshiva because, by law, they can’t. Perhaps they won’t find everyone seats on day one, but in time, they’ll make the necessary adjustments.

2. So, you might say, let’s change the State Constitution and get rid of the Blaine Amendment. Well, that is possible, but it’s a process that takes two years at minimum. In other words, if you’re going to try to force the issue by having everyone attend public schools, they’re going to be there for two years. I bet that within two years, the BoE will *easily* be able to absorb everyone.

There is also the fact that NYC only encompasses about 1/3 of the population of the state. Even if you could convince everyone in NYC to vote for this, you still have to deal with upstate, where the vast majority of the state doesn’t live anywhere near a yeshiva and doesn’t care at all about yeshivos. Convincing voters in the mostly yeshiva-less areas of upstate New York, where the majority of the state population lives, to fund yeshiva education from their tax dollars is going to be a *very* hard sell.

That’s the legal side of things. You also have problems with the very nature of the frum Jewish community in New York that will not make this work. Specifically:

3. The exclusive nature of yeshivos in New York. My family is a shomer Shabbos family. We keep kashrus. We learn. I am a ba’al kriah in shul. But there are families in this city who would never, ever consider a yeshiva where my kids would sit next to theirs because my kids watched TV and read Harry Potter and the like. If these parents don’t want their kids sitting next to mine, you can bet dollars to donuts that they don’t want them sitting next to a non-Jewish kid celebrating Christmas, coming to school with non-kosher snacks and singing the latest pop and rap tunes. Good luck convincing those parents to send their kids to public school for a week, let alone two years.

That, more or less, is the gist of the situation.

The Wolf

Wolf, your demographics are off. You forgot about Lo mb g Island ( 2.8 million ) and Westchester ( 980,000) which is considered economically downstate, not upstate. So, downstate is the majority

To be fair, the people advocating *registering* the children in public school before the school year, wouldn’t actually *send* their kids to public school on the first day of school (or any other day). They’d just force the city to build out facilities and hiring teachers costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

“They’d just force the city to build out facilities and hiring teachers costing hundreds of millions of dollars.”

And, they would care why? It’s not like it’s coming out of the governor’s wallet. It’s not a private institution, and moreover it’s run by Democrats. They would have no reservations about spending millions of taxpayer dollars.

Joe -“wouldn’t actually *send* their kids to public school on the first day of school (or any other day”

Another GREAT Idea! And then what??? If you cost the Goyim millions of dollars & then don’t send them to PS. Do you think that you’ll get away with this? They will hold all those kids as delinquents. Yeshiva education won’t stop the label of delinquency! What do you think will happen next?!?

The Blaine amendment is over 125 years old, its been challenged and held up. It was actually passed because of nothing to do with jews. it was passed as anti-catholism and anti-Irish to prevent money from going to catholic schools

Sabotaging the Public school system by registering kids and not sending them, will for sure bring down people against you, even those sympathetic to your cause

Joseph: The Blaine amendment, which is in many state constitutions, has been upheld frequently. It is based on the “establishment” clause, on the theory than any religious institution that is publicly funded becomes established.

And would you really want to have the government having a “Secretary of Religious Affairs” deciding which Rav would work in which shul, and what their Shabbos drasha would be. At the very least, government funded yeshivos would be required to toe the line ideologically, and that would be as bad as New York’s current plan to force yeshiovos to adopt secular, un-frum curricula.

“akuperma and NCB, did you not see rebbe yid’s post above???”

The only one I see is this one:
“I think he meant sign them up as a threat to bankrupt the public school system. But I’m not sure that would work for the most recent problem, because most of the local school budget is from property taxes (at least outside of NYC), so it would be a nice rough-up to the local school system, but not to the state govt that’s causing this trouble.”

Did they take down another one, or did you actually manage to read that in such a way that you thought he was agreeing with you? We know you meant your idea as a threat to bankrupt the public school system, but it’s not a private institution. What do you not get about this?

There have been laws for probably centuries requiring kids to be enrolled in school until a certain age. Obviously, there are various state requirements on what it means to be a proper school. None of this is new, except for the most recent attempt to ramp up the required hours. You guys are acting like it was legal to never educate your kids before this, and that it would be unconstitutional to require education. I’m sorry but this is as Constitutional as every other law regarding educational standards; it’s not different legally just because we find it harder to keep.

There are 2 things the seculars want us to do right now: change over to public school, fight back with immature arguments to the tune of “we don need no edjukation!” This thread is guilty of advocating both. Stick to the methods of the rabbis are using. There’s a reason they aren’t employing your strategies.

“What are we waiting for?”
“Why isn’t Rabbi Bender from Darchei and Rabbi Shechter from Chaim Berlin and Rabbi Brudny from Mir urging the parent body to sign up for school?”

Question 2 answers question 1.

@Joseph and others
Politicians are not stupid, although they do some stupid things.
They know that Hareidi children will nor be entering public school en masse, even if they are registered to do so.

If 10,000 Hareidi children register for the 2019-2020 term this coming spring/summer (in a school district), the district will not build schools and hire many staff.
The first thing the district will do is send transfer notices to the current yeshivos, telling them buses, health services and free lunch (in form of money or food stuffs) has been cut off effective the first day of school. If the Hareidi kids re-enroll in the yeshivos it will take months to restore these services.

If some Hareidi kids actually show up for public schools they will be put in empty seats where available, not their closest neighborhood school. Similar to the baby boom days, some schools could go on double sessions,
7:30-12:30 and 12:30-5:30. That afternoon session would not be appreciated by Hareidim on winter Fridays.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Not all states treat parochial schools the same way. Here in CT we not only provide transportation within the district, but secular textbooks, school nurses, psychologists, social workers and Special Education for secular subjects. All of this to the bsame extent that public school children receive them within an individual district. So, if the district only buses kids who live more than one mile from public school, the same rule applies to parochial school. Our public schools are closed on RH and YK, but the district still provides bus service to the parochial school on those days. Our district (one town) has an Orthodox Day School and Catholic and Protestant schools from K-12.

One choice is to move, en masse, to a state that does not regulate these types of things. California is a good example. But, there are MANY others.

Amil: The New York Council of Catholic School Superintendents is the official arm of the Catholic Diocese that controls all 500 Catholic schools in New York State.

The superintendents have rejected the state’s guidelines and directed all of the state’s Catholic schools not to participate in “any review carried out by local public school officials.” Thus they will not allow NYS DOE evaluators entry into any of New York’s 500 Catholic schools to even make an evaluation.

The official website of the Archdiocese of New York put on a statement Friday reiterating their opposition, supporting the Catholic Superintendents announcement that they will refuse to participate in this state evaluation and even specifically lauding and backing Rabbi Brudny’s and Rabbi Reisman’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal announcing the Yeshiva’s oppose the state initiative as well.

The whole sign-up enmasse and they’ll give us money to stay is ridiculous. They have an obligation to accept all students they cant legally buy people off to stay away. Theyll absorb yhe students. Will there be a lot of hassle, yes. Will there be sone hiccups? Yes. But they’ll figure it out because theyre required to do so.

Sigh; again? No one will actually send their kids to PS. It’s only a matter of registering without sending.

A bunch of phony registrations of yeshiva/BY kids into local public schools will result in a lot of paper shuffling and thousands of wasted hours of bureaucratic time entering and deleting registrations, reassigning staff etc. at a cost that will be passed on to NYS taxpayers in next year’s budget. While the educational gurus have a political tin ear, they generally know this is a hollow threat since most frum yidden wouldn’t really send their kids to the local public school, except perhaps for some enrichment program of after-school activity.

Logicyid -“If you register for public, and don’t send, they will arrest you for truancy.”

I already posted THAT!
See my post Above.

Even Lipa Schmeltzer.

Doomsday,

NY law only allows for a religious exemption. If you consider your garbage to be grounds for a religious exemption, then you don’t belong in this forum.