After an intensive campaign led by the Sephardic Community Federation (SCF) and the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg (UJO), the New York City Department of Education (NYC-DOE) agreed to increase federal Title III funding for private schools by $2.7 million per year. SCF and UJO worked with other non-public school leaders, including the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York and Agudath Israel, to resolve the multi-million dollar discrepancy. Every participating yeshiva in New York City will receive a share of the millions of dollars in new funding.

SCF Executive Vice President David G. Greenfield and UJO President Rabbi David Niederman, both of whom were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to the NYC-DOE’s Non-Public School Standing Committee, led the effort to obtain millions of dollars worth of federal Title III services for New York’s yeshiva students. After being named to the exclusive committee last year, Greenfield and Niederman undertook a top-to-bottom review of federal programs providing funding to yeshivas. They hired noted education consultant David Rubel to chair the SCF research team conducting the review. Rubel’s team discovered a funding discrepancy of $2.7 million per year that was supposed to go to private schools, but which was not actually ending up at the schools that were entitled to the funds. As a result of the finding, the NYC-DOE agreed to increase funding by millions of dollars to private schools to ensure an equitable distribution of federal funds required by the federal No Child Left Behind program.

This is the second major agreement with the NYC-DOE this year which resulted from the joint efforts of SCF and UJO. The first agreement, which was reached several months ago, resulted in thousands of yeshiva children being eligible to receive free tutoring services from Title I funding via a third-party vendor. When fully implemented, that first agreement is expected to result in $50 million dollars per year of free tutoring services to tens of thousands of yeshiva students throughout New York City.

“Our research uncovered several federal programs that should be providing New York’s yeshiva students with millions of dollars a year worth of services, yet were not doing so,” explained David Greenfield, Executive Vice President of SCF. “Armed with that data, we spent more than a year working with the Department of Education to bring about changes that would allow our yeshiva students to benefit from these federal programs. Boruch Hashem, our hard work has been rewarded, and the Department of Education has now agreed to provide millions of dollars in new funding for services to yeshiva students.” Greenfield went on to explain that in these tough economic times we need to be certain that yeshivas receive as much money as possible from government programs. “We will continue to work every single day to ensure that our yeshivas receive their fair share of government funding and programs,” Greenfield pledged.

(Yehuda Drudgestein – YWN NYC)