4 New Jersey Day Schools Cap Tuition for Decade
Four northern New Jersey Jewish day schools are promising to cap tuition for middle-income families for 10 years.
A $10 million grant from the Gottesman Foundation will offset the cost of keeping tuition flat at Golda Och Academy, the Gottesman RTW Academy, the Jewish Educational Center and the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy/Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, the New Jersey Jewish News reported.
Each of the four schools has agreed to limit total tuition expenditures to 18 percent or less of a family’s adjusted gross income, regardless of the number of children in the family. The program aims to help middle-income families who may be reluctant to apply for or do not qualify for traditional financial aid.
Scholarships for lower-income families will remain in place at the four schools.
According to the newspaper, that area of New Jersey is among the first nationwide to guarantee tuition breaks across a community in a coordinated effort to make day schools more affordable.
The $10 million grant from the Paula and Jerry Gottesman Family Supporting Foundation of the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater MetroWest NJ will also pay for incentives to attract new families, professional development for teachers, and an effort to market the region to prospective day school families.
In an interview that appeared last winter in Hayidion, the journal of RAVSAK, the community day school umbrella organization, Paula Gottesman urged a communal response to high tuition costs.
“Just as people pay taxes for public schools — and no one would say we shouldn’t do that — the Jewish community should tax itself for the education of our children,” she said. “Our collective future should be the responsibility of the collective community.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
