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One of the local day schools on whose board I sit, contracts out all scholarship requests to a business that provides this to Private Schools, both religious (Jewish and non-Jewish) and secular.
The company provides parents with a packet that must be completed. The parents are assigned a number to place on all documents and the personal identifiers are redacted before the packets are analysed by the staff.
The Day school receives back a report with a suggested amount of tuition forgiveness (scholarship) for each applicant by number.
The scholarship/finance committee at the day school determines the total dollar amount of tuition relief that may be granted for the year. It is sent back to the outside company who apportions it to the applicants by percentage to be forgiven. A final report comes back to the school and parents are notified of the award and what the tuition bill will be. Parents then make a decision to accept and sign a contract or reject and find other sources of assistance or another school.This outside system has relieved the stress of volunteers and their reluctance to serve on the day school board and/or scholarship committee. No favoritism comes into play using the outside company.
I learned about this 10 years ago when I was asked to sit on the Board of a local secular Prep School. Sometimes, we have to look outside the box
But also, the kids are really entitled to an education and denying them an education is abuse. It isokay to put together an emergency home school when legally possible, but just keeping the kids out of school because their school ceased to exist is not okay.
This should take care of problems divulging personal information like Wolf was describing. But it also sounds like it would be expensive- can yeshivas afford to outsource their tuition committees?
Perhaps a similar identification number system can be done even if there is no outside compnay involved?This is a letter from a parent of several children in yeshivas. We have trouble financially and even qualify for government assistance. Yet the yeshivas are charging us such that we don’t know how we can manage. Besides the agreed tuition amounts we also are pressed to pay about $500 for school lunches per child because the school “needs” to order catered food, about $500 per child for shabbatons and trips and of course about $500 for registration. In contrast public schools are free with free lunches.
I understand Baruch Hashem many members go to hotels in Florida or Las Vegas for several Yomim Tovim and have new cars for each family member. But what should struggling families do? Are the yeshivas truly taking adantage of the free aid given to private schools to alleviate the burden on struggling but loyal Jewish families? Is there a need for coach bus trips to ther states a few times a year or catered lunches when it can be free? Is this a community Yeshiva or a country club? When I was studying in yeshiva I did not realize it may be a “privilidged school”.They might not have a choice. If they think it is a temporary situation, it might not be in the kids’ best interest to send them to another school in addition to the fact that it might be impossible.
A home school could be a good idea, but it might not always be possible.
I’m also not sure if it’s so terrible for kids to be out of school for a few weeks. After all, it happens every summer.
It sounds like it could be a good idea. In terms of being expensive, it sounds like the point was to save resources so they end up gaining financially.
My concern is that I’m wondering if an official non-Jewish organization can really do this the right away. They are going to look at it in a very technical way using very objective criteria that can be computed and calculated. I don’t know how these things work, so I can be wrong, but aren’t there many subjective criteria involved in these things? And wouldn’t the Frum world have different considerations than the goyish world?
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