Is Jewish day school tuition a form of birth control?

Never mind that one more kid would leave us hopelessly outnumbered, or that we might forever be buried under mounds of laundry, or that – as two working parents – meal preparation would cut severely into our sleep time.

We knew kids would be a lot of work and that we would experience things our stay-at-home moms never did. And we knew young boys could be a challenge.

Yet, we might have taken the plunge if it weren’t for the sheer expense of raising children – and for us, the cost of a Jewish day school education is a big part of that.

Even if we could find a way to endure three years of daycare fees for a third child, sending three kids to day school would cost more than $30,000 a year. That’s more than many average after-tax salaries, particularly among working couples where one parent is the lead income earner and the other takes more responsibility in the home.

Around tax time, it gets depressing to read news reports that say our household income ranks among the country’s highest, because we’re barely making ends meet with two kids in Jewish day school. There are also limits to what public servants and journalists like my wife and me can earn, at least if we want to limit our hours and stay involved in our children’s lives. (Note to self: remember to ask the editor for that $20,000 raise – just for being me.)

It’s especially tough as we begin to worry about how we’ll eventually replace the family car – a 1996 Nissan Sentra – never mind finding the money for a shul membership (something we can’t afford right now), modest bar mitzvah celebrations, day camp fees, music lessons, swim lessons, JCC memberships, rising utility bills and the premium we all pay for the privilege of living in The Big Sprawl.

A third child? The bottom line is just too squeezed, and the biggest line-item in the budget is tuition.

The Toronto Jewish community simply must to find a way to help reduce fees, because a day school education, particularly for kids from non-Orthodox homes, is probably the single best predictor of future Jewish affiliation, and the numbers show that day school enrolment has dropped for the fourth straight year.

UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s allocation to Jewish day school education may be the highest on the continent, but it’s not enough, and it’s largely aimed – as it should be, in the absence of more money – at providing subsidies to families in the most need. Middle class families are largely left on their own.

I’m aware that Ontario is the only province that doesn’t provide some kind of funding to religion-based schools or programs, and that one religion is funded while all others are not. Nevertheless, as we have seen with the Liberal government’s repeal of the Tories’ private school education tax credit, it’s strategically questionable to rely on politicians to fix the problem, particularly in a time of tight public budgets.

As well, the tax credit was obviously meant to buy Jewish votes for a party with policies that many felt were contrary to Jewish values, and it made the Jewish community a sideshow in the contentious debate on the future of public education.

Elsewhere, notably in Cleveland, community fundraising has helped to create an endowment fund that has helped cut tuition at some day schools by 45 per cent for this year. (In one case, tuition was reduced to $5,500 US from the expected amount of $10,000 without the endowment). In Boston, at least part of a $45-million dollar gift from a local group of anonymous families may go, at least in part, toward a similar endowment, though details about that gift and how it will be allocated have yet to be determined.

Why can’t we fundraise for an endowment to reduce fees here?

In Toronto, it seems fundraising priorities have been skewed toward new buildings rather than making sure there are enough Jews to fill them in the future.

As day school parents struggle, the community plans to spend $100 million tearing down and rebuilding the Bathurst JCC, and $150 million building a huge new campus at Bathurst Street and Weldrick Avenue in Richmond Hill.

Here’s my suggestion: why not refurbish the Bathurst JCC – or cut back on the scale of the project – and build a more modest campus in York Region. (The Weldrick project is often justified in terms of an ever-growing GTA Jewish population. But you have to wonder how much more we can grow, given low Jewish birthrates and stabilizing migration rates from other cities in Canada, particularly Montreal. As well, there are limits to sprawl and a large chunk of York Region’s Jews seem to live south of Highway 7, and hence almost as close to the Bathurst JCC as to Weldrick.)

With the money saved from scaling back these mega-projects, the community could start a sizeable tuition endowment fund and build from there.

As to whether we plan to have any more children, such a fund may arrive too late for us.

But I look forward to playing basketball with my 10 grandchildren at the Vaughan JCC in 2035.

Daniel Wolgelerenter is a CJN copy editor and a graduate of Associated Hebrew Schools and the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto. His two boys attend the Toronto Heschel School.