This is the second in a two-part series of articles about the costs of Jewish day school education in the Milwaukee area.
The Helen Bader Foundation is the primary source of financial aid in the Milwaukee area for most Jewish families seeking to provide a day school Jewish education for their children.
In fact, Tobey Libber, program officer for the foundation’s Jewish Life and Learning area, said he believes one reason Milwaukee Jewry has a high proportion of its students attending Jewish day schools is because of “the strong support” from this foundation.
(According to the most recent census, 44 percent of Milwaukee area Jewish children who receive formal Jewish education attend Jewish day schools, while 27 percent do nationally. See Jan. 25 Chronicle.)
According to Libber, the foundation has been offering such aid since its earliest years. (The foundation was founded in 1991.)
Libber further said that since that time, of the some $170 million the foundation has distributed to its various causes, “about $5 million” of that has gone to assist families with the cost of day school tuition.
This assistance has gone to all five Milwaukee-area Jewish day schools: the three elementary/middle schools, the Academy (Hillel), Milwaukee Jewish Day School and Yeshiva Elementary School; and the two high schools, Torah Academy of Milwaukee (for girls) and Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study (a boarding school for boys which also has a post-high school program).
Libber also said that the program — called the Helen Bader Scholarship Fund for Jewish Day School Education — comprises about 25 percent of all the foundation’s funds distributed in its Jewish Life and Learning area, which itself constitutes “about 15 percent” of all that the foundation does.
Libber said that the foundation’s first allocation for this was $35,000.
Beginning with the school year of 2005-06, the foundation allocated $1.5 million to be distributed in amounts of $500,000 over three years. “That probably is going to be as high as it gets,” Libber said.
“We have only so much to give away each year,” he said. “This remains a high priority, but there are so many other needs.”
Anonymous applicants
The foundation made these funds available to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, which oversaw their distribution. In fact, in Libber’s previous position as MJF planning director, he was responsible for the process, he said.
For the past “six or seven years,” the funds have been administered by the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the MJF’s education program, according to CJL executive director Steve Baruch, Ph.D.
Baruch said the process begins with parents filling out applications for aid at the schools. Parents do have to provide financial information on the form.
However, CJL receives the applications with all names crossed out, so the individual families cannot be identified, Baruch said.
Diane Hahn, CJL’s scholarship coordinator, added that people on CJL’s scholarship committee, which receives the applications, “for the most part now have no children in any of these schools,” so there is “no conflict of interest.”
However, the name “scholarship committee” may mislead readers about how the process works, Hahn explained. No student directly receives “a scholarship,” or a share of funds from the Bader foundation.
Instead, the committee recommends what tuition the school should charge a specific applicant family (a recommendation the school doesn’t have to accept), and then calculates a “need” based on the difference between the recommended charge and a “weighted tuition” fee.
This fee, Hahn explained, is produced by a calculation. If all the 671 Milwaukee-resident students in the 07-08 school year would have paid full tuition at all the day schools, that total would be $6,602,420. Divide that number by 671, and you get $9,840 per student as the “weighted tuition.”
Say, for example, the scholarship committee determines and recommends that an applicant family with three children should pay $8,000 per student ($24,000) at a specific school. That leaves a “need” of $1,840 per student ($5,520) for that school.
The committee then adds up all the “needs” and determines the percentages applying to each school (i.e., x% of the “needs” total comes from MJDS, y% from YES, etc.). Those percentages are then used to determine the amount of the $500,000 Bader grant that each school receives.
Invariably, Hahn said, the entire $500,000 is used up. Equally invariably, that Bader grant doesn’t cover the full “need” shortfall calculated for each school, she said.
It also happens that some families do not receive this tuition break. According to figures Hahn provided, for the 2007-08 school year, 296 students from 161 families applied for this tuition break; and 273 students from 140 families received it.
And the Bader grant was only able to make up about 50 percent of the “needs” of the day schools — the difference between the reduced amounts and the “weighted tuition” fees.
Election issue?
So the day schools still have to figure out how to make up the shortfall, which they usually do by raising their own money, Hahn said.
The schools also have endowment funds. Bert L. Bilsky is executive director of the Jewish Community Foundation, the endowment development arm of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. He said that all three day elementary schools have “restricted endowment funds with us.”
Bilsky also said that “the best thing” the schools can do to develop their monetary strength “is to develop more endowment funds” and that the MJF is trying to help them do this.
However, there is one other source of funds that currently helps one of the schools and its families.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program provides state funds for private and religious school tuition to qualifying low-income city of Milwaukee resident families.
The only Jewish day school currently eligible to participate is the Yeshiva Elementary School. This past school year, 140 YES students, about 70 percent of the student body, received funding from the MPCP program (see June 6 Chronicle).
For many years, some politicians have sought to expand the Choice Program to students and schools outside the city of Milwaukee, said Michael Blumenfeld, director of the Wisconsin Jewish Conference, the state Jewish community’s community relations and political lobbying organization.
But this effort is controversial within the Jewish community. The conference and the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations opposed the program from its inception in the late 1980s, contending that providing taxpayer funds to religious schools undermines church-state separation. They remain on record opposing its expansion.
Blumenfeld said that with the state legislature out of session, the earliest the matter could come up would be in the session beginning this coming January. He also said that choice expansion could be an issue in some state election races this autumn.
He added that the conference might revisit the issue if somebody from one of the 17 communities represented would argue that Choice Program expansion would help Jewish schools and Jewish education in Wisconsin.
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