Day schools unite for funding effort

BASYA LAYE

Jewish community day schools here recently secured $280,000 in provincial Group One independent school funding. King David High School, Pacific Torah Institute, Richmond Jewish Day School and Shalhevet Girls High School join Vancouver Hebrew Academy and Vancouver Talmud Torah (who previously secured funding, in 2004 and 2007, respectively), meaning that all area day schools now have ongoing additional funding from the province.

Relieving high tuition costs and filling gaps in financial need at the schools is a formidable goal. Aside from what each institution can raise on its own from tuition fees and private donations, support, in large part, comes from the provincial government and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, the largest and second-largest funders of the Jewish day school system, respectively.

As the person largely responsible for securing the 2007 funding for VTT, Ari Shiff brought his experience to the table to the benefit of the larger community. A father of five and a hedge fund manager, Shiff is acutely aware of the gaps that need to be bridged when it comes to the consistency, affordability and accessibility of Jewish day school education. He has been working on improving facets of the local day school scene for the past several years, and served as co-president of the VTT board from 2005-07. Currently, Shiff has expanded his involvement to include a role on the VTT finance committee, where he is also founding chair of their capital campaign, and he is co-president of KDHS, member of its finance committee and chair of its Group One committee, and founder and member of PTI’s finance committee.

In an interview with the Jewish Independent, Shiff noted that there were several people who came together in a formal working group to make system-wide Group One funding a reality, including David Sacks; VTT principal Cathy Lowenstein and VTT director of operations Mark Maibauer; Russ Klein and Sandy Jorgenson from KDHS; Shay Keil, M.J. Brown and Shuli Ben Moshe from RJDS; Rabbi Dovid Davidowitz and Louise Beaton from PTI and SGHS; and Meyer Mattuk, representing VHA.

“The achievement of Group One funding across the city is yet another example of how, in the absence of a board of Jewish education in Vancouver, the schools have been working together to support each other,” the working group’s joint statement explained. The milestone has ensured “approximately $1,100 in additional funding per student at the four schools, or $280,000 in additional provincial funding for Jewish education for the 2011-2012 school year, and a similar amount in every future year, depending on enrolment.... KDHS will receive approximately $150,000 in additional funds; RJDS $90,000; PTI $18,000; and SGHS $22,000.”

There are several reasons that Group One funding had been difficult to achieve and even harder to maintain. In particular, each school’s funding and financial reporting matrix had to be re-imagined and reformulated for success.

“There are several forms of funding that the government gives, actually, but the two basic ones are Group Two and Group One funding,” Shiff said. “All [independent] schools qualify for Group Two funding automatically – Group One funding is worth far more. The ironic thing is, to qualify for Group One funding, the thinking was that you actually had to be a ‘poor’ school. Not poor in the sense of money, but in the sense of your offerings. The idea was that the government was trying to create a minimal level of education throughout the province and, so, if you were spending more in order to create a better education, you would actually receive less money from the government. It seems almost punitive that the better the school you are, the less money you would get from the government. That was the conventional thinking. What we did with the Group One initiative was we turned that on its head.”

Reorganizing the financial reporting and management of each school took specific expertise and the working group assisted each institution with the process from start to finish. Shiff and the others were able to learn from the successes at VHA and VTT in particular.

“When I got involved with this at VTT, and for about 10 years previously, VTT was trying to achieve Group One funding and couldn’t. And the reason that they couldn’t was because the conventional thinking was that ... you think of the school as two schools: a secular school and a Jewish school. All the secular costs go into the secular school and all the Jewish costs go into the Jewish school. The problem is, if you have an enriched program, like you have at VTT or KDHS, where you offer music and languages and gym and drama, all the bells and whistles that parents expect, that makes the secular school very, very expensive. When you add it all up, you’re at a number that is too high, you’re above the number that is acceptable for Group One funding. So, David Sacks and I came up with this system. We looked at the Christian schools ... clearly, there’s a way to do it because these schools are doing it. These are good schools, they’re not poor schools, so there must be a way to do it.... It was simply a different way of looking at the problem than anyone had ever looked at it before.”

A couple of years later, Sacks and Shiff approached KDHS with an offer of help, even though, Shiff said, “they didn’t believe it could be done.” That all changed, however, once Shiff joined the board and, with Mark Zlotnik, started the high school’s finance committee. “It was a simple matter of sitting down with the right people at the right table and getting it done,” noted Shiff. “I also founded the finance committee at PTI last year, so I wanted to bring PTI into this, as well. Once we were doing it with two schools, I said, ‘OK, who else needs it?’ We had been erroneously told that RJDS had Group One funding and so we didn’t ask them and then, when we were all done the process, we found out that RJDS had lost their funding and so we did the whole thing all over again with RJDS.”

Though RJDS had previously independently secured funding, the model they were using couldn’t support fluctuating enrolment and so they lost their status – twice. “The reason why they lost it is because it was so dependent on their enrolment,” Shiff explained. “Every time their enrolment went down, they had to divide their costs over a smaller number of students and so they came in too high to qualify for Group One funding.”

In a statement, Keil, who is president of the RJDS board, expressed the school’s gratitude for the guidance. “This increased Level 1 funding goes a long way to enhancing our existing programs and creating new opportunities for our students. We are very grateful to those in the community that assisted us in achieving Level 1 funding and we are confident that we will achieve this higher funding for years to come.”

“That’s one of the beauties of the system we’ve devised – there is a very large buffer now,” Shiff said, which also allows PTI and SGHS, which are very small schools, to qualify. “Not only did they qualify,” he said, “but they qualified with enough room that, if they were to lose five students next year, they would not be in danger of losing their funding.... We wanted to make sure we weren’t just going to qualify for this year, but we were going to qualify, theoretically, forever, so we were very careful about that.”

SGHS director of education Rivka Abramchik told the Independent, “The additional funding will go into additional programming for the students and will definitely alleviate some of the financial burden that was placed on students and their families, and will allow the staff to implement some programs that the school previously was not able to afford.”

There are direct and indirect benefits of the funding. The direct benefit is that it will allow schools to offer larger tax receipts on tuition payments, a significant incentive for families. Another considerable, though less tangible, benefit is that the funding will alleviate some of the gap between what schools must fundraise and what they receive from JFGV.

The process for maintaining Group One status is fairly simple, Shiff explained. “There is going to be follow-up meetings with each of the schools periodically to make sure they’re not running into any issues. We haven’t had any of those meetings yet, but what I’ll recommend to them is that we put into place the system that we put into place at VTT, which is that any expenditure that is made and every budget meeting that takes place is always seen through the lens of Group One funding.... So, if enrolment drops by 50 kids, you turn to Mark Maibauer and you ask, ‘How will this affect Group One funding?’ And if he says, ‘This puts us offside,’ then we have to start cutting costs to make sure that we get back in tune ... it always goes through that lens.”

Though JFGV was involved in the initial push to secure Group One funding, they were not involved with this latest round. However, board chair Mitch Gropper told the Independent that the organization congratulates the schools on their achievement. “This strong focus on financial management issues is critical to the long-term sustainability of Jewish day schools in our community,” he said in a statement.

Rabbi Don Pacht, head of school at VHA, expressed a sentiment that reflects a shared feeling that the process was a positive one and bodes well for the community’s future.

“It is wonderful that all of the area Jewish schools are now at Level 1 funding, as it brings additional resources to Jewish education. The fact that so many people from a wide range of organizations worked together to assist one another in these efforts is a testament to how truly special our community is,” he said.

Integral to the initiative’s success seems to have been the collaboration between Shiff and Sacks. In an e-mail interview, Sacks said, “It was a pleasure working with Ari and each of the school administrations to achieve recognition as Level 1 independent schools by the B.C. Ministry of Educ[ation]. This was made possible by the respect and appreciation in Victoria for the outstanding educations delivered at our community day schools. Ari was the driving force and deserves kol hakavod for his vision and effort.”

Shiff plans to continue his involvement.

“Vancouver is a small community and you can have a tremendous effect, simply by rolling up your sleeves and getting involved,” he said. “That’s the same speech I give when I recruit board members to KDHS or when I did to VTT. I go, ‘What is your passion? What is the thing that most interests you? What would you like to see happen in the schools?’ And, chances are, you can make it happen, simply by getting involved. So, for me, I first got involved in the schools because I was shocked that VTT, after being around for 90 years, was on the verge of bankruptcy. I believe that all Jews are financially brilliant,” he joked, “I couldn’t believe the school was in such a bad place! So, I joined the finance committee and got involved and cleaned it up.... KDHS was a very strong school, it didn’t need my help to be a strong school. The problem was that it was a school that was predicated on having 250 students and, if you only had 140 students, you had to really change the cost structure to make it work. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re turning it into a school that, hopefully, will be at 250 one day, but, in the meantime, it’s going to be solvent at 140.”

Of this solvency, he later added, “The schools are getting stronger and stronger, it’s really wonderful. We are really building the foundation for the future of Vancouver. It’s so painful when I have to put on my fundraising hat and go and talk to people and they had a bad experience at VTT or some other school 10 years ago and, therefore, their kids left the Jewish system never to return, and the families are no longer supporters and they feel like it’s an issue that should only be dealt with by parents at the school – they don’t feel it’s a community responsibility. You know, once you’ve blown it, you’ve blown it for generations. It’s very important to get it right the first time. Once a family has put down roots at, say, St. George’s, that can go on for generations and generations.”

There is at least one other education-related project important to Shiff. “A number of years ago, I started an initiative to get joint [tuition] assessment, so that families that need it would get it in one central place,” he explained. “We got all the schools and camps to sign on and then Federation declined to fund it. In the meantime, what’s happened is, because we’ve built the system at VTT to do this, a lot of schools have since turned to the people at VTT to have it done for them.” For the project to be completed, however, an institution or donor will have to step forward to fund it.

Such obstacles, however, do not phase Shiff, who sees the Group One experience as a push to continue his efforts. “It started out as a KDHS initiative and became a community initiative, just to make sure that we got everybody covered and, hopefully, where this will eventually lead is a board of Jewish education,” he said.

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