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FINANCING THE FUTURE OF CONGREGATIONAL EDUCATION
FINANCING THE FUTURE OF CONGREGATIONAL EDUCATION
Paul A. Flexner, Ed.D.
For Jewish Education News, Winter, 2007
Many years ago, I drew a chart of the relationship between the congregational school and the congregation as a unit. There were four major components: The ritual space of the sanctuary and chapel; the social space of large and small party rooms and a beautiful kitchen; the business space for the offices and meeting rooms; and the educational space. As the people of the book, we should not leave out the Library which should have been located in the educational space but was generally an offshoot of the business or social space as it catered mostly to the adult community. These spaces symbolized, at the time, the organizational structure of the congregation. Although things have changed to some degree, this model remains representative of the budget and finance activities in most congregations.
Why is this important when looking at the systems through which educational programs are funded within the congregation? Following the lead of Jack Wertheimer’s concept of the Jewish community as a series of “silos”, the congregation often acts as a series of silos, each serving a different population within the community of its membership. An examination of the values underlying the financing of the congregation and all of its programs will guide us in thinking about the way in which the schools and other educational programs for the under 18 age population are understood.
As a backdrop, an understanding of the sources of income for the institution as a whole will be helpful. These sources speak deeply about the nature of congregational life and how decisions are made with regard to the place of the congregation in people’s lives. For it is only through the people in the congregation that we begin to understand the nature of how funds are raised and distributed to meet their needs. With rare exception, the primary source of funding in congregations is through membership dues and appeals to members. Additional income is derived from tuition for educational programs and fees for programs with the largest sum coming from the families with children in either the early childhood program or religious school. A few older congregations have created endowments which provide a moderate level of elasticity when other sources decline in a given year or there is a major expense (usually related to facility maintenance or personnel change).
Put in stark terms, the financing of a congregation is a form of self taxation where members serving in leadership roles determine the dues, tuitions and fees for the community. Through the budget process, decisions are made that reflect the values of the people who make those decisions. When new needs arise or there is a desire to recast the congregation into a more active environment, there are parallel needs to either find new funds or to reallocate funds from other initiatives. This is all basic economics. But, the endgame is that the leadership is challenged with making decisions that affect the individual contributions of the entire membership.
THE CHALLEGES
There are four key areas that influence the decision making of every congregation: 1) evaluating the status of existing programs and services, 2) balancing the needs of the entire community, 3) setting priorities and 4) planning for the future. These interlink with each other as individual leaders are faced with choices, often in a semi-vacuum, where the input of the large majority of members is rarely heard or even sought. The situation is further complicated within a congregation where there is little program evaluation or analysis beyond the personal (and sometimes biased) observations of the professionals and those who are the most involved and have the loudest voices.
Within this environment, it is very challenging to set meaningful priorities or to discover the real needs of the congregation without instituting an ongoing and meaningful planning process that engages professional leadership, volunteer leadership and a cross-section of the members at large. Of course, it is this process that will influence the ongoing work of the entire community.
This leads to a different kind of question: who is the community and how should they be represented? In many congregations, leadership consists of three very distinct groups. First, there are vatikim, the long time members and former leaders, who may or may not be actively involved in the day to day operations and decision making. But, through their long years of engagement and often deep financial pockets, their voices resound with authority. (In days past, these individuals who were mostly wealthy men engaged in business made all of the decisions without much input from the community.) Second, there is an active Board with its committees that believes they represent and speak for the membership as a whole. Although there is some truth to this belief, their ability to lead and guide the congregation is often limited by their lack of a deep understanding of the values of Judaism and the Jewish community.
One of the unfortunate realities of congregational life, especially in older more established institutions, is that these two groups rarely talk to each other. The result is that they both turn to the professional staff, the third group, which serves as the fulcrum between the two and as the only knowledgeable group of Jewish leaders who understand what a congregation can or should be. This places the rabbi, educators and others in a very tenuous position of guiding a congregation that has little understanding of where they want to go.
THE REALITIES OF CURRENT FINANCING
Assuming that the scenario described above resonates, we turn now to the deeper questions of financing Jewish education in the congregation. For two generations, from the late 1940’s through the 1990’s, providing a Jewish educational program for the children of the congregation was considered a primary function of the congregation. It was often described as ‘supplementary’ as it was originally created as a supplement to the learning that took place in the home and in the community. With the rapid expansion of Jewish life into the suburbs, the Jewish education now provided by the congregation is generally the only exposure that the children and their families have to serious, if we can call it that, Jewish learning and engagement.
As the transition has taken place between the more intense community life of the past and today’s more assimilated living within the American community, a similar shift has taken place affecting the level of intensity of the Jewish learning experience for the children and their families. And, yet, congregational leaders still place a high value on the educational programs, or at least the expectations that they have for their results. Children should be able to participate actively in the worship experience, have knowledge of their Jewish heritage, perform well at their Bar/Bat Mitzvah, and be committed to continuing their engagement in Jewish activities and learning in their high school years. All of this and more will be found as clearly stated goals for most congregational boards and other leaders.
In this environment where the expectations of a quality education are being counterbalanced by a shift to a less intense program with its parallel reduction in the budget, questions arise as to how the congregation will properly finance a program that will achieve the results that all expect and desire.
We begin by turning to the realities of congregational life and the normal budget process. Each educational program – early childhood, religious school and youth group – submits a proposed budget which includes both expenses and income. Due to the nature of the educational programs, other than the early childhood program which we will discuss later, where the income rarely covers the expenses, there is an expectation that the congregation will cover the projected deficit. This is called deficit financing by the larger organization, or put in different terms it indicates that the education of the youth is a shared responsibility of both the parents and the congregation.
In analyzing the budget of the school, and in many cases the youth program as well, the finance committee, which generally has little understanding of the nature of educational programming and their resultant costs, is challenged to make difficult decisions that balance the needs of the entire institution. Their choice is often between providing proper maintenance, covering the salaries of a variety of professionals including rabbis, cantors and administrators, covering the cost projections of the school or raising additional funds through a dues increase. Over the last 25 years in conversations with educators, the reality is that boards often opt to reduce the subsidy for the educational programs. Not surprisingly, the educational programs continually reduce the number of class hours, provide less professional development for the faculty, often operate with less than adequate supplies, rarely are able to support new initiatives to engage the families more deeply in their children’s learning, and frequently select as the educational leader an individual with little if any formal training in educational leadership and/or a meaningful Judaica background.
There is one possible exception to this scenario. Many congregations sponsor an early childhood program. Although these programs enroll relatively small numbers of children, through careful financing and management they are expected to show a profit at the end of the year. There expenses for staff, materials and programs are more than offset by the tuition charged. Thus, the congregation is able to project an income from the program. But, there are two caveats to this. First, congregations rarely factor in the overhead for operating the facility including the custodial care. And, second, the salaries of the staff are almost always so low that faculty and staff continue to work in these programs more for the love of children than for the income. It has often been said that a pre-school teacher could earn more by flipping hamburgers or waiting tables!
Even if we include the early childhood program, all of this paints a rather grim picture of congregational education. The funding streams are scarce. The commitment from the leadership is often placed in a compromising position by the larger needs of the congregation. Not unlike our local, state and national governments, these leaders do not like to increase the costs to their members by raising dues and fees, although they do from time to time. More important, the decisions that are made rarely reflect a clear understanding of what is involved in educating the children, a knowledge of the needs of the students or teachers to improve the quality, or the need to create new and dynamic programs that will bring new excitement and create a deeper commitment to Jewish life among the learners or their families.
FINANCING FOR THE FUTURE
Some might say that the results of a congregational education are such that we as a community might be better off simply closing down the system. On the other hand, well over seventy percent of our children receive their only Jewish education in this setting. We cannot, as a community, turn our backs on these children and their families. As a result, our only choice is to find new ways to finance a quality Jewish educational program within the synagogue.
Over the last decade and more, financing Jewish life, in general, and Jewish education, in particular, has shifted. An entirely new stream of funds have been finding there way into Jewish education. Both large and small foundations have been created by individuals and families with unusually large financial resources. Whereas their predecessors supported the community fund or federation with their resources, the new model is to use their wealth in targeted ways to address the most critical issues facing the community. Of particular note, a small group of major funders have established three new national entities with particular focus on day schools, camps and early childhood. There is also a major international initiative to fund our post-high school young adults on their first trip to Israel. These new initiatives have set a high standard for other funders to follow.
Although there are several recent examples of funders, usually in local communities, providing grants to support new initiatives for congregational education, this avenue for obtaining new financing remains in its infancy. Most of these projects were created through the efforts of a central agency or an academic institution where the need to address the needs of congregations very closely fit their mission. By starting small with an imaginative idea, they were able to attract the interest of funders who provided the means for expansion.
As successful as these initiatives have been (and documentation is available to verify their success), the ability or willingness of others to join in support of major change initiatives to address the quality issues of congregational education have been lacking. Could this be that the visions of the few and their willingness to take major risks to bring about change are not shared by others? Or is it that there is a complacency within the Jewish community that is reflected in the continuing decline of congregational education while day schools, camps and travel programs are flourishing?
Moving from the limited success of the few to the system as a whole, it is important to return for a minute to the professionals who are charged with the leadership and management of the educational programs. In this I am referring to both the rabbis and educators within the congregations as well as to many central agency staff. These men and women are highly talented people with a deep commitment to the Jewish future. And, yet, they do not have the training, the skills and, in many cases, the time to actively seek funding from foundations at the level that would begin to make a difference in the quality of congregational education. The process that funders have created to apply for and then to evaluate and submit reports is complicated and often too burdensome for these overextended professionals.
This leaves us with one final source of new funds – the federation community. With rare exceptions, albeit quite notable at times, the federation community has not provided direct funding to synagogues. Instead, in the larger communities, the federation has provided direct support for a community agency or department that works directly with the congregational schools. These central agencies sponsor professional development programs, develop curriculum, organize teacher resource centers, provide direct support in the areas of special needs education and operate Hebrew high schools, among other activities. But, these organizations, as effective as some of them are, lack sufficient resources to fully support the change initiatives that are required if we are to see significant improvement in the congregational education programs.
As the recognition that the synagogues are the one institution in the community that attracts the greatest number of Jews, if only for the purpose of providing an education for their children, it becomes incumbent on the federations to rethink their role as the community leader in building and strengthening the congregational education system. While the foundation community is investing heavily in a limited number of national and international initiatives, it is the federation at the local level that can and must create new ways to increase the resources to strengthen the congregational community. Through the use of their unrestricted endowments, the influence that they have on the funders who have placed their funds into restricted endowments and their formal planning and allocations processes, the federations are in the best position to create a new and dynamic Jewish community with strong congregations that place Jewish learning at the core.
If the Jewish community including the federation and synagogue leadership, and their educators, in particular, begin to think in new and exciting ways about creating and attracting new resources to support congregational education, the Jewish community will fare far better in the coming decades. We all know that the Jewish community has the resources. The only question now is: Will the leadership understand the difference they can make in the future of the American Jewish community by investing heavily in congregational education?
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