A member of the community, responding to GAJE’s recent call for the government of Ontario to ameliorate its unfair funding policy in relation to children with learning disabilities, sent GAJE a reminder this week of the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s (OHRC) policy on accommodating students with disabilities.

In 2003, the Ontario Human Rights Commission published a comprehensive policy statement on the subject of ensuring that children with learning disabilities too receive the opportunity of an excellent education. The document was entitled Guidelines on Accessible Education. The province had also published a companion document, The Opportunity to Succeed: Achieving Barrier-free Education for Students with Disabilities.
Both documents are available online at the OHRC website.

The OHRC categorically states: The Ontario Human Rights Code guarantees the right to equal treatment in education, without discrimination on the ground of disability, as part of the protection for equal treatment in services. Education providers have a duty to accommodate students with disabilities up to the point of undue hardship.

Alas, as we know, in the severely financially strapped and now precarious Jewish Day School system, many, if not most students with learning disability cannot be accommodated, precisely because the funds needed to do so are lacking.

The OHRC also categorically states that under the Education Act, the Ministry of Education is responsible for setting out a process for identifying and accommodating disability-related needs in the publicly funded elementary and secondary school systems. The Ministry must ensure that all exceptional pupils can access special education programs and services without payment of fees. The Ministry is responsible for funding levels and structures, legislating procedures, and creating appeal and monitoring mechanisms.

Is it not the time, some 15 years after the guidelines were enshrined by the OHRC into a formal text, that the government apply its obligation to the schools outside the publicly funded ones? How can the government be so indifferent to the special-needs children outside the public school system?

The essence of the issue that troubled the Ontario Human Rights Commission was how to overcome the obstacle of disability in relation to children’s education. It was not how to differentiate among schools so that the obstacle can be successfully overcome. The fact that the Human Rights Code also acknowledges the legitimacy of accommodating religious education, where warranted, suggests that the government should be able and indeed must make every reasonable effort to integrate both of these vital human rights.

The government’s current funding policy however effectively precludes a child from access to reasonable accommodation in relation to a religious component to her education once she asks for reasonable accommodate as well in relation to her disability needs.

How is this fair? Indeed, it is not.

The year is 2017. It is now well past time that the government of Ontario also take seriously the spirit of the learning disability guidelines of 2003 promulgated by the Ontario Human Rights Commission regarding health support services for disabled students. The government should extend health support services to all of Ontario’s disabled students.

This is the moral thing to do. It is the correct thing to do.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Our children return to school next week.

Given the momentous announcements during the past academic year of the closures of certain day schools, we must ask whether in the imminent years to come there will remain a Day School system in the GTA that includes non-Orthodox schools.

It is a fair question.

In anticipation of the first week of school and in acknowledgment of some of the key issues facing our community regarding the future of the system, The Canadian Jewish News published five education-related articles in this week’s print edition of the paper. Two of the articles bear directly on the affordability crisis.

Under the headline “Families push for equal funding for special needs”, The CJN reporter Lila Sarick wrote about the inexplicable discrimination by the government of Ontario in its policy of differentiating between schools for health support services for children with special needs.

Sarick interviewed Allan Kaufman, a Toronto lawyer who tried – in vain, alas – to right the discriminatory wrong. “If you’re a disabled student in a Catholic school, you get treated like a king or queen. If you’re a disabled student in a Hebrew school, it depends on the kind of disability you have,” Kaufman told The CJN.

“If the provincial government had never decided to fund the disabled students in the Hebrew schools, then they could still take the view we’re not funding any students in Hebrew schools. But once they start to fund it, does anybody think there’s an argument about why they fund one disability but not another,” he said.

Rabbi Lee Buckman characterized this particularly objectionable discrimination as “apart from core funding, the most significant area of need for government support.”

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) has also joined the lobbying effort against the government. It is imperative that the government hears loudly but pointedly from voters that discriminating in this manner against children with special needs is particularly objectionable. The discrimination must stop.

In an article entitled “Reimagining Jewish Education”, Toronto educators Dan Aviv, Sholom Eisenstat and Frank Samuels present a compelling case for parents, families, the community and all other interested parties to embrace a new model of delivering Jewish education. They call it “blending Jewish”. The model “employs the best practices in e-learning” and still relies upon “experienced educators and advisers” to help students reach “new heights of thinking and creativity” and learn the skills they will need to face the future.

The authors cite three ways in which “blended Jewish” has the potential to transform Jewish learning.

We commend the article. Moreover, we commend its authors for applying their minds and focusing our thoughts on serious, new, imaginative, feasible and effective ways to make Jewish education in our community affordable.

Aviv, Eisenstat and Samuels acknowledge, “blended Jewish” may not be for everyone. But it stands to reason that their model will be for many others. The community ought to consider implementing a pilot project to determine the feasibility of the proposal.

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To all children returning to or starting school this week, we say: enjoy a wonderful year of blessing, discovery and fulfillment.

And we also say: Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Earlier this month, Gabe Aaronson wrote an article about the high cost of day school tuitions in Kol HaBirah: Voice of the Capital, a bi-weekly print and online publication serving the Maryland, DC, and northern Virginia Jewish community.

Although restricting himself to local data and local examples, Aaronson’s essay could apply to the GTA as well, as his introductory paragraph illustrates.

“Education has been a cornerstone of Jewish life for millennia, and American Jewry’s increasing focus on affordable day school tuition reflects that priority. On the one hand, there is huge emphasis on the importance of a day school education for the future of the Jewish community. School leaders stress to parents that the value of a good dual-curriculum is well worth the expense. On the other hand, many parents told Kol HaBirah that the price tag can create a financial burden that disrupts family life, impacts family-planning decisions, or makes it harder to donate to synagogues and other communal institutions.”

In exploring the issue of the increasing unaffordability of day school, Aaronson makes the following key points:

• Even families with comfortable incomes can struggle with tuition.
• The heads of Jewish institutions generally agree that tuition is very high, but most believe that increasing enrollment is more important than lowering tuition and that there’s a tenuous link between the two.
• While the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington continues to look for ways to offset the cost of day school tuition, the Federation and the day schools are exploring ways to market the value of a Jewish day school education to parents. According to the Federation, this approach is better supported by the research.
• Jewish schools could use more economies of scale. The average operating cost (not including scholarships) for Jewish schools the Greater Washington area was significantly higher than what the public schools spent, including all construction costs, in both Maryland and Virginia.
• Many parents disagree with the notion that the high cost of tuition is only a problem for individual families but not for the community as a whole.
• Multiple parents told Kol HaBirah that community members are choosing to have fewer children to better afford the price of Jewish day school.
• The takeaway for parents is that unless something big happens, tuition will keep rising. • School administrators, meanwhile, don’t necessarily see this as an unsustainable reality. “Good education is costly,” one administrator said, particularly in Jewish schools “that are providing a rich dual curriculum to [their] students.”

The issues that GAJE has been discussing publicly for some two years are being discussed in various communities throughout North America. The affordability crisis diminishes all communities. It is imperative that we resolve it – urgently. In truth, it is the highest priority for all communities.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

In his quasi-autobiographical work, Encounters with the Jewish People, the late British scholar and author, Chaim Raphael, described Jewish kinship as “a living force” that fostered in him “many special vantage points” that he “was impelled to explore.” Succinctly, he explained why. “I was responding always to a changing world and a changing self. In every situation, life was being enlarged through the interest one brought to it as a Jew.”

Raphael’s observation is remarkably uplifting. It eloquently rebuts and spins on its head the oft-heard justification from many Jewish youths for shying away from life as a Jew because they find it confining, narrow, insular, excessively particularistic and insufficiently universalistic.

In stark contrast to this easy abandonment of one’s identity, Raphael’s embrace of his Jewish connection was precisely because it “enlarged” his life.

Among the many moving insights he shared in “Encounters” was how he felt about his feeling of connection (kinship) with and for fellow Jews.

“The Jews, torn between pride and despair, have always tried to establish for themselves, where the real meaning [of interpreting the words of Torah to illuminate Jewish feeling and Jewish history] may lie: but the search presses on us today with a new intensity. As a Jew, one has been impelled by the events of our time into a recognition that the old kinship works on us now with a categorical imperative. To be casual about it, to belittle its implications, has become an act of moral indecency.”

Even though Raphael wrote these words in 1979, nearly 35 years after the end of World War 2 and some 30 years after the founding of the State of Israel, they are as compelling today as then. The Jewish population has grown only slightly since 1945. And it is likely a sad truth that “the old kinship”, as Raphael termed it, “works on” a smaller percentage of the younger Jewish generation than ever before.

It is among the chief purposes of Jewish education to ensure the everlasting connection among our children to “the old kinship”. And that is why GAJE cannot rest until Jewish education is affordable. We will never be casual about this.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Glenn A. Drew, a founding member of the Board of Trustees of the American Hebrew Academy in Greensboro, North Carolina has written an important article, entitled The Delusion of Affordability, in which he eloquently pleads for more involvement by the philanthropic community in funding and sustaining Jewish day schools.

Drew makes the point that for no other key societal institutions – universities, hospitals, and museums – do we expect the consumer to pay the actual cost of operating the institution. “So why do we hold Jewish schools to an impossible double standard? Doing so is not only delusional; it is an affront to those who dedicate themselves to Jewish education,” the author asks.

Drew pleads the case of the Jewish schools: they are vital to the Jewish future and they require ongoing community involvement to maintain and sustain. Forever.

“Donors take note; Jewish schools continue to have the highest return on investment by any measure when compared with other Jewish programs, based on the numbers of young people who reflect unwavering pride in their Jewish heritage, strength in their Jewish identity, and a lifetime commitment to Jewish community, leadership, culture, experiences, support for Israel and Jewish life in the diaspora.

“The statistics are irrefutable. The Jewish People Policy Institute’s (JPPI) report on Raising Jewish Children found young Jewish leaders are disproportionately educated in Jewish schools. Jewish teen social networks influence the decision to attend Jewish schools which in turn furthers Jewish marriage.”

Drew acknowledges “affordability is not the only obstacle to Jewish school growth”. But it is the core of the core. The main point of his article, however, is that Jewish day schools are indispensible for the Jewish future and it falls to the entire community – including, if not especially the philanthropists among us – to maintain and sustain those schools. If we are to have the Jewish future of which we dream.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Since GAJE formed some two years ago, we have constantly pointed to the patent unfairness of the educational funding policies of the Government of Ontario. In 1996, the Supreme Court of Canada decreed those policies to be legal. But no one then and no one since has ever decreed them to be fair or just.

Today, some 21 years after the Supreme Court’s decision, many people are again questioning why the Government of Ontario – alone of all the provinces in Canada – should maintain its discriminatory policies. The reasons for Ontario finally to “do the right thing” are many: educational, economic and most important, moral.

Two weeks ago in this space we quoted Ben Eisen, director of the Fraser Institute’s Ontario Prosperity Initiative, who has advocated that Ontario adopt a more inclusive and not exclusivist funding policy.

Adopting a model where the province pays a portion of the general studies curriculum of private, independent schools “would accomplish two important things,” Eisen wrote. “First, it would ease the financial burden on existing independent school families who now pay the full cost of their children’s tuition, plus taxes, to support government schools. Second, it would bring independent education and greater educational choice within the financial reach of more families.”

We also quoted Charles Pascal, professor at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and a former deputy minister of education who advised former premier Dalton McGuinty on educational matters, who has called separate school funding “an anachronism.”

Despite being enshrined during Confederation, Pascal said it no longer has merit in a multicultural province.

We agree with Eisen and with Pascal.

GAJE has engaged the services of a lawyer who will explore the feasibility of attempting to “reopen” the 1996 decision. It may still be legal. But it is a legal anachronism the effect of which – according to Eisen’s research information – is to cost the Ontario educational system more than it need, impede Ontario from achieving excellence in its province-wide educational system and to continue to perpetrate unfair, unjust, discriminatory policies on a wide swath of Ontario families.

We hope to be able to bring positive reports in the future about the possibility of finally making illegal Ontario’s public discriminatory educational policies.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Dr. Sarah Levy, Director of Jewish Life and Learning for Denver Jewish Day School in Denver, published an article this week on eJewishphilanthropy.com entitled “Asking the Tough Questions: A Challenge to Jewish Day Schools”.

The author encourages school leaders, staff and lay people to ask questions aimed at improving the ability of schools to fulfill their important missions. In effect she urges individuals to ask questions if indeed the questions are “le shaym shamayim”, i.e., for the sake of arriving at the truth without any secondary agenda.

“We recognized that we have to strive to advance our organization and build capacity and be strategic,” Dr. Levy wrote. To achieve that purpose, she encourages all interested to ask pertinent and relevant questions.

In that vein, core GAJE members decided at the last monthly core group meeting that a true resolution of the affordability crisis in our schools must include an examination of the issues related to systemic costs. Affordability will be achieved not only by reimagining funding of the system, although this perhaps is the key.

GAJE will not attempt to substitute its judgment for the judgment of the administrative teams of the various schools that comprise the GTA system. Nor will it deign to micro-manage specific school situations. Rather, GAJE sees itself as another resource for the community in the vital campaign to make Jewish education affordable.

“Questioning is part of Jewish tradition,” Dr. Levy wrote, “and in the interest of our students, we must embrace questioning, and we must ask those tough questions.”

We agree.

GAJE will only ever ask questions for the true purpose of trying to ensure the permanent viability of the day school system in the GTA.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Ever since 1996, the Government of Ontario has used the Supreme Court of Canada decision (Adler v. Ontario) as a pillar to prop up its unfair, discriminatory educational funding policy and to hide behind, away from the moral spotlight.

Some 21 years after the Supreme Court’s decision, it is time for the public to attempt to legally dismantle that pillar, to remove the government’s prop and to force it to stand openly in the remediating light of moral clarity.

Some people correctly ask: what has changed in the intervening 21 years that might yield a different result to the legal question posed to the court in 1996?

The answer is: a great deal. The social climate of the country on the issues underpinning the Adler case – and in Ontario too – has shifted since 1996.

We point out the following recent developments. There are undoubtedly many more of which we are unaware.

a. Quebec has overhauled its educational system by unifying its curriculum. Denominational approaches to teaching the curriculum must conform to provincial standards. The reciprocal denominational teaching arrangements of the two founding cultures (Catholic and Protestant) that were enshrined in the 1867 nation-building document, The British North America Act, are being revised and supplanted.

b. The government of Saskatchewan this year invoked the rarely used “Notwithstanding” clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to ensure that its province-wide education policies would be inclusive and not necessarily bound to the strict interpretations imposed by the 1867 agreement.

c. An Ontario grassroots coalition – One Public Education Now (OPEN) – has announced that it will legally challenge Ontario’s separate school funding policy.

d. Individuals, expert in the educational field, are starting to speak out against Ontario’s approach to funding education. For example, – as we noted in an update some weeks ago – Charles Pascal, professor at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and a former deputy minister of education who advised former premier Dalton McGuinty on educational matters said separate school funding was “an anachronism.” Despite being enshrined during Confederation, Pascal said it no longer has merit in a multicultural province. A legal challenge, Pascal speculated, will “change the landscape” sufficiently to prod the politicians.

e. Individuals, expert in economic policy, are also starting to speak out against Ontario’s educational funding. As we noted in last week’s update, Ben Eisen, director of the Fraser Institute’s Ontario Prosperity Initiative, advocated that Ontario adopt a more inclusive and not exclusivist funding policy.

“Adopting the B.C. model -[where the province pays a portion of the general studies curriculum of private, independent schools] – would accomplish two important things,” Eisen wrote: “First, it would ease the financial burden on existing independent school families who now pay the full cost of their children’s tuition, plus taxes, to support government schools. Second, it would bring independent education and greater educational choice within the financial reach of more families.”

f. And of course, some two years ago, Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education was formed to bring the subject of affordability back onto the community’s agenda for discussion and debate and to help actually find answers to the affordability problem.

Helping “change the landscape”, as Charles Pascal suggests, to establish once and for all that the continued discrimination by Ontario in its educational funding is utterly unacceptable, is also part of the way GAJE sees making Jewish education affordable.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE