I remember how it was -- JR
New York Jewish schools welcome Israeli children after October 7 horror: ‘Light in the dark time.’
When Stephanie Cramer left her home in southern Israel for New York City three days after the October, 7, Hamas attack desperate to seek safety, she also had to find a school for her three-year-old daughter.
Luckily a friend told her that Rabbi Arthur Schneier Park East Day School on the Upper East Side was offering to enroll children from Israeli families — and Yarzen, 3, found a classroom, with the school waiving her $30,000-a-year tuition.
She was not alone.
At least 168 Israeli students have been placed in 22 private Jewish day schools in New York City, Westchester and Long Island following the Hamas massacre, according to the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropy of New York (UJA).
And Jewish day schools across the country have seen a historic uptick in enrollment as more than 1,000 temporary Israeli students sought safety, according to the Enrollment Trend Report released earlier this month by Prizmah, Center for Jewish Day Schools.
The schools have also seen an uptick in demand from US parents transferring children from public schools since the Oct. 7 attacks, with 32% of those who moved children saying it was because of their previous schools’ response to the terrorist attacks.
Cramer, 30, who is also a U.S. citizen, left her husband, Erez, 30, who was deployed to Gaza to fight in Israel and brought their daughters Yarzen and 1-year-old Arava, to stay with her father in Hell’s Kitchen and feared finding a place for Yarzen would be difficult.
“I assumed it would be more complicated to find them a school mid-year,” said Cramer, who met her husband when they both served in the IDF.
“The moment I reached out they returned my call. The following day we came to see the school and the next day my 3-year-old started class in the early childhood development program.”
Rabbi Arthur Schneier Park East Day School (RASPEDS) welcomed 22 students from Israeli families following Oct. 7, after it sent out a memo to parents alerting them to their Open Doors Policy to Displaced Israeli Families.
“A lot of the schools [in Israel] had shut down right after the war began. Parents didn’t want their kids to be in lockdown again like during COVID,” Debbie Rochlin, principal of Rabbi Arthur Schneier Park East Day School, told The Post.
“Some parents felt they wanted to come to New York and have their children in a safe place.
“Our doors were open, and we were ready to provide a warm, nurturing environment for these students, ensuring that they can continue their academic journey without interruption.”
Rochlin says her faculty streamlined the admissions process by waiving all fees as well as tuition, and providing mental health counseling to students in need. Third grade, she noted, saw a particular uptick in Israeli students transferring in.
“It’s difficult in general for children to enter any school mid-year, let alone a foreign one, but our teachers and students embraced them,” Rochlin said.
Other schools which have enrolled Israeli children include Manhattan Day School on the Upper West Side, The Ramaz School on the Upper East Side, Luria Academy of Brooklyn and Westchester Day School.
Jewish day schools across the country have seen a historic uptick in enrollment as more than 1,000 temporary Israeli students sought safety, according to the Enrollment Trend Report released earlier this month by Prizmah, Center for Jewish Day Schools.
Among the complications are that the Israeli arrivals, like Cramer’s daughter, speak Hebrew as their primary language.
“She was learning a lot – her English improved. She could express herself [better] – it was a great place for her to be,” Cramer said.
Cramer returned to Israel to reunite with her husband who was released from the Israeli Defense Force in November, but the family are keen to move back to New York and re-enroll their daughters in a private Jewish day school.
Westchester Day School, a modern Orthodox Jewish private school for toddler through eighth grade in Mamaroneck, Westchester, was a refuge for Elana, who asked The Post to leave out her last name for privacy reasons, and her four kids aged 17, 14, 11, and 8.
With schools closed in Israel, the family left to stay with family in Scarsdale, New York on Oct. 12, and started her elementary aged kids after Thanksgiving.
“I said, ‘I have to get them enrolled in something.’ They were home doing nothing. We didn’t know what was going on with the war. Our kids were out of school for a month,” Elana told The Post.
WDS waived tuition fees — which are up to $29,700 a year— and bypassed requests for transcripts, she said.
She and her family are back in Israel, but hope to return to New York permanently.
“Personally when you’re displaced it’s a dark time for you,” Elana told The Post. “This gave us that light in the dark time.”
https://nypost.com/2024/01/31/news/nyc-jewish-schools-welcome-israeli-families-after-october-7/
***************************************************The Decline in American Universities, 2011-2024
Like ancient Rome, American universities have not fallen or declined in a day—or even a year. But as good of a date as any to measure the beginning of the decline is 2011. Enrollments started falling that year and since then they have fallen by roughly 15 percent. The ratio of college students to the total American population has declined even more—around 20 percent.
A decline of this magnitude for this long is unique in American history. Underlying this is a sharp decline in public support for universities. At the beginning of this decline, the primary complaint was over costs—colleges were too expensive. Costs had been rising far faster than not only inflation but, more critically, family incomes. In the three decades before 2010, American families could more readily than ever afford big televisions, cell phones, vacation homes, cruises, and other luxuries—but college education was becoming financially more burdensome.
Inefficiencies abound. Unlike in the rest of the economy, productivity in higher education was probably falling as the staff to student ratio rose. Buildings were empty too much of the year, faculty were writing a lot of articles of little consequence for miniscule audiences. Administrative bloat was already well under way. All of this is well before the pandemic beginning in 2020.
But the cost explosion is a minor factor in the big enrollment decline from 2010 to 2020. After all, in the previous decade (2000 to 2010) of rapidly rising tuition fees, enrollments rose robustly—by more than one-third. The single event that did more than anything to trigger the decline came on April 4, 2011 when the U.S. Department of Education in a “dear colleague” letter proclaimed that sexual violence on campus led by horny male students was a national problem, mandating remedies making a mockery of traditional Anglo-Saxon procedures of adjudicating wrongful behavior (e.g., no right to cross examine witnesses, prosecutors often serving also as judges or the equivalent). By 2015, these procedures were widely adopted.
The result? An exodus of men from campuses. Between 2015 and 2020, enrollment fell by nearly one million students with 87 percent of the decline being men. College student affairs offices, responding robustly to the Department of Education fatwa, declared a war on men as they administered Star Chamber justice.
An even more sinister university bureaucracy exploded roughly simultaneously, “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) offices. These offices have declared that justice demands that students swear fealty to a “diversity” agenda that evaluates students mainly on race, with a secondary aim at giving favorable status to gays, transgender students and others adjudged disadvantaged by the DEI bureaucracy. The dominant problem today is the fundamental positive rationale for higher education has been imperiled: universities have largely lost their reputation as places for robust debate and consideration of all viewpoints, instead moving towards becoming authoritarian institutions depressingly similar to universities in the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
Associated with the new woke supremacy centered around “social justice” has come a decline in academic standards and expectations, with even prestigious selective schools dropping such important tools of assessing applicants as entrance examinations like the SAT. Grade inflation, already excessive endemic even in 2010 continued, with most students at our so-called elite universities getting “A” or “A-” grades. With that has come less time spent on academics.
Parents started asking “why send our kids to radical leftish and expensive schools where there is a good chance they either will not graduate or will end up in low paying jobs? The New York Federal Reserve Bank published “underemployment” statistics showing the vocational risksof pursuing a degree were pretty high. College graduates might average lifetime earnings of one million dollars more than high school graduates—but 40 percent or so of college freshmen do not get degrees in any timely fashion.
To be sure, there are enormous variations between schools—a great strength in our university system. Some schools are decidedly non-woke without typical obsessions over people’s skin coloration, religion or national origin. Others want kids with a strong sense of belief in God and rejection of what they regard as the sins and immorality of modern America.
I am cautiously optimistic that market forces, even weakened by the government subsidized environment of higher education, will lead to healthy change. The ultra-woke schools will be punished—already Harvard’s early admissions applications are down substantially—while traditional institutions emphasizing academics will do better. Reports are appearing that applications and enrollments are robust at some schools promoting traditional academic and sometimes religious values. Falling applications at ultra-woke schools will be accompanied by state governments increasingly attacking the instruments of leftish collegiate domination such as DEI. Private donors will start becoming more demanding while making gifts. One aspect of the revival would be to make college comfortable to males again.
This renaissance of campus sanity could be disrupted by the federal government, already the most single negative factor in modern higher education. An activist Department of Education, largely ignoring legislative intent and constitutional restraints, could impede reforms, joined by allies in the accreditation cartel. The 2024 elections should feature higher education issues more than usual.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14808&omhide=true&trk=title
****************************************************Australia: ‘We want our school back’: Newington parents, old boys gather to protest co-ed move
Students returning to Newington College on Wednesday were greeted with a parent protest outside the school’s gates, as backlash intensified against a decision to admit girls to the 160-year-old institution.
A group of parents and alumni gathered at a Stanmore park before walking to the private school’s main campus gates carrying placards that called for the college to reverse plans to transform into a fully co-educational school by 2033.
Newington announced late last year that it would admit girls in the junior school from 2026, and become a fully co-educational campus by 2033. The decision, made almost two years after the idea was first floated to the school community, has drawn intense criticism from some parents and old boys.
An online petition objecting to the co-ed move has garnered 2300 signatures, while a separate group of parents is threatening legal action against the college over the plan to enrol girls.
In November, a letter from law firm Brown Wright Stein was sent to the council chairman Tony McDonald on behalf of parents and old boys, challenging the validity of the co-ed plan and arguing it was contrary to the inner west school’s trust, which was established in 1873.
The decision also prompted Newington’s Founders’ Society chairman Greg Mitchell to quit his position and withdraw his bequest to the school.
“I believe this decision is ideologically driven by the minority and is now being imposed on the whole of the Newington community with potentially disastrous consequences,” he told the Herald last year.
The Founders’ Society was established in 2010 to raise money for the college and for student scholarships by asking alumni to donate by making a bequest in their wills.
A separate coalition of parents and old boys have also set up a group called Save Newington College to campaign against the co-ed move and lobby the school to overturn the decision.
“Such a seismic shift in this extraordinary school will destroy the great traditions and heritage that make Newington College the greatest school for boys in Australia,” a message on the group’s website says.
Morgan, who graduated from the school in 1990 and is one of the founders of the Save Newington group, said 640 alumni and current and former parents had registered to be a part of the group.
“The Save Newington group is not directly involved in any legal action, however many of our groups’ supporters are, and we are all interested in its success,” said Morgan. “The group has helped to pass on information from the legal action group to our supporters, including fundraising efforts.”
A former parent at the school, Kerry Maxwell, who is part of the MOONS (Mothers of Old Newingtonians), said she attended the protest to help “speak up on behalf of a lot of families I know that are furious about this decision, but they’re too scared to talk”.
“Parents signed up for a boys’ school. They heard nothing about possible co-ed plans for months and then there is a sudden announcement. Now if parents try and get their boys into other schools they can’t.”
Another old boy, Tony Retsos, who graduated in 1977, said he had “nothing against co-ed” but the school “had been a private elite boys’ school for 160 years and the process to consult about a decision of this kind wasn’t sufficient.”
“All we want is for the decision to be reversed and a proper consultation with all stakeholders. Without more information the decision is unfathomable,” he said.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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