Englewood, NJ – The surprise wasn’t that a meeting envisioned as an informal conversation among about 10 people drew more than 300 from across Bergen County. It was that something like Raphael Bachrach’s modest proposal – and the fevered debate it has set off – didn’t happen sooner here or someplace else like it.
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Mr. Bachrach is a Jewish parent in a suburban school district where a majority of Jews are Orthodox and send their children to Jewish day schools. A year ago, he proposed a Hebrew-language charter school as an alternative.
That was turned down, but local school officials proposed an alternative. The district has a highly regarded program where elementary school students learn in both English and Spanish. Englewood’s interim superintendent, Richard Segall, raised the possibility of a similar dual-language program – strictly nonreligious – in Hebrew and English, that would attract both Jews and non-Jews.
It would be the first public school Hebrew-English program of its kind in the country.
There is a Hebrew-language charter school in Florida, and one has been approved for Brooklyn. But Englewood’s proposal would be in an existing public school. The issue is particularly close to the surface in suburbs where high local school taxes and expensive day schools combine with the economic meltdown.
“We are losing precious Jewish souls because of financial birth control,” Amy Citron, a mother in neighboring Teaneck, wrote in January in The New Jersey Jewish Standard, arguing that children should be enrolled in public schools and then afternoon religious programs.
The proposal in Englewood offered an alternative for Jewish families who either wanted a public alternative to religious schools or no longer could afford them. For the district, which is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, it offered a pathway toward its mandate of diversifying its schools and the potential to heal some of the fractures in a community where social divisions are mirrored in educational ones.
Mr. Bachrach, a father of five, said his motivation was not financial but personal and cultural – he was unhappy with his older children’s experiences in a religious school and uncomfortable with the cultural division in town.
“Englewood is a very divided kind of community,” he said. “People don’t know people across town, and it goes both ways; we don’t know them and they don’t know us.”
ON the other hand, Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, of Englewood’s Congregation Ahavath Torah, said religious day schools had become a bulwark against assimilation: families send children there for both a religious education and a Jewish experience strong enough to give them a Jewish identity they’ll carry off to college and beyond. You can’t duplicate that in the public schools, he said.
“We as a Jewish community try to strike a very fine balance between being in the world and participating in society and at the same time maintaining a very strong Jewish identity,” he said. “Until now, the greatest success we’ve had in maintaining that balance has been through the Jewish day school system. We need to be open to new ideas, but I’d be very hesitant to do anything that would threaten the day school process.”
He said Jewish community leaders were looking at various proposals, one of which would ask the entire Jewish community to support the private day schools, not just Jewish parents – in effect a voluntary school tax on top of the compulsory public school tax. That’s probably a tough sell these days.
Agreeing on the concept would be far easier than the details of keeping it an educational program, not a religious one – kosher school kitchens? Paid use of school facilities for after-school religious instruction? Private prayer supervised by rabbis or parents? – that would go into making it work.
Dr. Segall said it was clear that the program would have to be secular and fashioned for both Jews and non-Jews. “It’s definitely not a simple thing to work out,” he said.
In Teaneck, A. Spencer Denham, the acting superintendent, sounded interested but skeptical.
“The district will certainly look at the concept, since there is considerable public interest in it,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “However, we have to ensure that the constitutional issue, of undue entanglement of government and religion, must be in focus from the start. That presents a very high hurdle for the concept to be pursued.”
Since the article mentioned there is a dual-language English/Spanish school, how is that implemented? Is it truly secular in that no Hispanic/Latin culture is injected into the curriculum or is it a sham, and merely another way to avoid having to force Spanish-speaking children from learning to read/write/speak English?
We should not try to create “hybrid” schools to circumvent the prohibitions on public assistance to religious schools. If yidden believe in torah education, than pay for the yeshivot and stop kvetching about all the taxes you pay for services you don’t use. I pay taxes for lots of public services I never expect to benefit from but thats the price of living in a democracy. If full time torah education is not a priority than either send the kindlach to an after school talmud torah or provide some at home instruction but don’t expect the public to pay for it. (Also, don’t argue that if all the yhesivot dumped their kids on the public schools it would cost a lot more.). That argument has been shot down by the courts many times.
There are plenty of dual language schools, some private some public. The public ones are ok if they just teach the second language and use that language for some secular subjects – i.e. you can teach math in Hebrew without getting into the mystical meaning of various numbers. A literature course can read and discuss Moby Dick or the Grapes of Wrath in a Spanish translation without promoting Catholicism. So, you could have a hebrew language public school but it would have to be very careful not to teach or promote religion. Presumably a lot of teachers would be jewish since there may not be many non-jewish teachers fluent in hebrew. They would have to be careful not to discriminate in any way against the non-jewish students, and the curriculum would need to be quite similar to regular public schools.
yiden dont get carreid away becasue of a streesed aconymy dont do this to your children, remeber what happened to the people who imigrated and have send their children to public school.
Most of these bochurim sitting for years in yeshivot and kolel learning should move on to public schools and colleges do learn a trade and earn a parnassah. We cannot afford to have them sitting doing nothing while we starve the schools educating the younger children from the resources they desparately need.
Tuition is a very touchy subject in frum circles, but I would never propose public school as a solution in today’s American cultural environment. My husband and I have discussed homeschooling as an alternative. We are happy with our children’s schools, but meeting the demands of the tuition committee is getting harder each year. I would love to homeschool my kids, but I will keep them in the local frum schools for as long as we can. I hope my husband’s job is stable, but if anything happens to it, the kids come straight home.
Homeschooling is a wonderful alternative. Parents can teach good middos to their own children better than any teacher ever can and one-on-one instruction (or one-on-four sometimes here, as we do some subjects all together) is the only way to make a child’s education truly al pi darko. And the total cost for kindergarten this year? $500. Finances are a strong consideration, but for us the primary considerations are quality of life and quality of learning.
#8 , tell us, in all your educated splendor, what happened to these people.
נומער אַכט, זאָגט אונדז, מיט אַ סך חכמה, װאָס איז געשען מיט זי מענטשן
I am a staunch believer in the public school system. There are excellent educational opportunities for the public 230; we are ALL the public 230; make it work for you and your family. The people trying to institute a public school that works for the public good should be commended. There is absolutely nothing wrong with sending your children to public school and then to religious institutions afterwards. It worked for me; it can work for others. Believe it or not, there are observant Jews in public school systems nationwide. In high school, I knew several people who wore yarmulkes daily and lots more who took off every holiday to attend shul with their families.
My siblings and I were observant kids in the public schools. it was not easy, we were picked on, but we managed and grew up frum. I homeschool/ed my own children for economic reasons. I live in FL where there is Ben Gamla now. Most of the families who put their kids there are Shomer Shabbat and only have their kids there because it is free. For people who cannot homeschool, it is good that Ben Gamla is there.