A second one .. This is insane

amother

Vermilion

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 10:59 am

amother [ Violet ] wrote:

Does anyone know how much tuition was in Ateres? With most of 200 girls paying tuition, and some fundraising, they should be in bearable condition, I think so.
About the boy school that closed was it in Lakewood? I didn't hear anything about it, could you please fill me in

Lots of politics. Many parents left. More politics. More parents left. Most of the school was absorbed by a similar type of school so it wasn’t big news. There weren’t many families left at that point.

amother

Vermilion

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 11:03 am

keym wrote:

The boys school that closed is a more yeshivish/heimish school. You could pm for a name.
This is unfortunately what happens. Last year an extreme RW school in Lakewood closed, without much drama and fanfare.
It's a real problem. We all scream we need more schools. But the schools open without a strong financial backing and vague assurances from askanim and gevirim.

If the parents aren’t full invested it’s also a problem.

An administrator of a local school was telling me that the younger crowd only wants to pay the cheap tuitions (and not full) and doesn’t want to assist the schools beyond that. People are spending a lot more on housing then in the past and they just don’t have as much to give. He said new school families used to look for ways to help out. Not anymore.

amother

Apricot

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 11:38 am

Our system needs a major overhaul. Any by system I'm not referring to any particular Jewish lifestyle. I'm referring to our entire Jewish lifestyle approach where we leave finances out of all our major life decisions.

- Young adults getting married without knowing how to support themselves.
- Choosing kollel lifestyles without a strong structure to support themselves now and/or in the future.
- Having large families with the sole consideration being that Hashem will provide
- High standards of living in the name of yiddishkeit
- expected to give our kids all the luxuries out there, including camps, trips, etc.
- expecting young men without any proper education to be able to support private schools for their many kids.
- expecting parents of large families to be able to marry off & set up homes for all their kids
- pay for the expenses of Jewish lifestyles - Shabbosim, Pesach, YT, clothing, kosher food, etc.
- yeshiva dorming, learning in Israel, seminaries
- and more..

There's got to be some sort of balance to even out the equation. If we expect to maintain the current setup, we are basically expecting that the large majority of Jewish families earn 6 figure incomes. And if we expect that, then we need to prepare our kids to be able to do just that. We need to teach our kids how to prepare for a financially viable future. Either we figure out how they can make ends meet in this current system, or we figure out a way to lower expenses. We can continue to rub our hands together and cry out when brick by brick this current setup falls apart, or we can actually dig our heads out of the sand and start doing something about it.

True, Hashem will and does provide. But only if we do our hishtadlus. And is going against the nature of the world, going against the way Hashem set up the world, that we have to have sensible plans to earn money to pay for our needs, is that considered hishtadlus? Or is that considered expecting miracles to happen on a large scale?

We don't need asifos on tznius, or technology at the moment. What klal yisroel desperately needs at the moment is our leaders to get together to figure out how to make Jewish life affordable for the average person. Agudath Yisroel and our other leaders are so quick to rear their heads in other situations, but they're all sitting on their hands ignoring the elephant in the room.

PinkFridge

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 11:46 am

Apricot, you're talking about two things:
1. Structures that might not be sustainable. Which is not the same thing as saying down with kollel. Just that we can't expect added support as parents have larger families, are helping parents, all sorts of different and important expenses.
2. The working poor and even middle class can't pull it all off.

Which is where communal support comes in. B"H for Federations, etc., as was said upthread.

amother

Apricot

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 11:52 am

amother [ Vermilion ] wrote:

It's not by choice that many are not fully invested. We are no longer living in yesterday's times when a people's 1-2 week paycheck covered their monthly expenses. The younger generation is living paycheck by paycheck and in so many cases, that doesn't even largely cover their monthly expenses.

They live with the intense pressure of scrambling, borrowing & trying to cover everything, but after a while that's too much to handle on a daily/monthly basis. So they choose to prioritize the absolute necessities and push the rest to the sidelines. And that's perfectly understandable. Living with that pressure and headache takes a big toll on their health, on their behaviors and their homes. Due to our current setup of our system (as I explained on the prev post), we are asking of them to do the impossible, and we honestly cannot hold them responsible for the results.

Let's stop pointing the fingers at the wrong parties. It's not these parents who need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, it's our system that needs to be overhauled.

amother

Apricot

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 11:56 am

PinkFridge wrote:

That's exactly what I said - it's not any particular lifestyle, kollel, or working parents. This is related to our current setup of Jewish lifestyle as a whole, where life decisions are made without financial considerations. The entire Jewish lifestyle needs an overhaul.

Communal support can only do so much. When it's the large majority that needs help, a small minority of rich can only make a small dent. We can't continue living a lifestyle where a small minority is expected to cover the bill for society, especially when B"H our generations are growing by leaps and bounds.

amother

Vermilion

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 12:16 pm

amother [ Apricot ] wrote:

Young working non kollel families buying 850.000 + homes in Town and then can’t afford to pay tuition is the problem. Not the kollel families in many cases.
I talk to my friends who but these homes and they don’t know how they’ll make the mortgages with 2 babies. What happens when they are 4 tuitions.

No adifa will make them not buy.

Notsobusy

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 12:27 pm

amother [ Apricot ] wrote:

So many of the young couples today have no idea what it means to budget. I see them buying houses young, or renting big apartments, leased cars, multiple vacations a year, going out to eat all the time. The wives and husbands are always perfectly dressed in the latest fashions. Their babies need the best of everything.

It's not all young couples, from the couples I know the more yeshivish couples are better about scrimping, the less yeshivish have no idea how or why to do it. Obviously that's only the couples I know, the couples you know may be different.

But yes, our entire system needs an overhaul.

amother

Apricot

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 12:59 pm

Notsobusy wrote:

Well, it you're raised in an environment where finances aren't to be considered into decisions, what do you expect to be the outcome of that? Financially healthy rounded adults, or adults assuming that Hashem (or the gov't, parents or community) will provide?

amother

Apricot

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:04 pm

amother [ Vermilion ] wrote:

That's the part of our problem that I alluded to earlier. Raising our kids to expect a higher standard of living, while not including financial considerations, is another aspect of what's wrong in our current setup.

All of these issues that the many separate posters refer to all lead back to one thing - we don't include financial considerations in our current setup of the Jewish lifestyle. And what we have now is precisely the result of it. Not knowing how to budget, expecting high standards without the due consideration of the cost of it, tuitions not being able to be paid for, a larger than normal poor sector, unusual amount of financial help needed, etc.

Simple1

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:30 pm

amother [ Apricot ] wrote:

Or course it has everything to do with the school closures. They're closing because lack of funds. Lack of funds because many can't pay full tuition. And why can't they pay?

Most Lakewood schools manage to stay viable. These schools had specific factors that made them not viable. If anything the common thread that ties them together is that they are (to a certain extent) not your typical Lakewood school. (Though, I do personally wish these schools would get more widespread support.)

Last edited by Simple1 on Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:31 pm; edited 1 time in total

Notsobusy

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:30 pm

amother [ Apricot ] wrote:

I'm not sure if the problem is that people don't know how to budget, as much as they think they deserve the high standards that they see other people living with. A lot of them don't seem to understand that you can only buy what you can afford, if you can't afford the fancy...simcha, carriage, clothing, car, house, vacation, sheitel.....then you just can't buy it. But there's this new attitude in the frum world that "I deserve to have whatever everyone else has, and I have to give my kids whatever their peers have".

I feel like my grandmother saying this, but this is really the "es kimpt mir" generation.

Notsobusy

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:32 pm

Simple1 wrote:

You're probably right about that, which is so sad, Lakewood needs such schools so desperately. I know so many kids who are so unhappy in the schools they're in, but there is no middle of the road alternative. Especially when it comes to high school.

Simple1

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:39 pm

Notsobusy wrote:

And that's why I think this needs a spinoff. These attitudes can be found in the most successful schools. Maybe less so in the less popular schools. So it's a problem, but there seems to be no correlation to school closings.

Last edited by Simple1 on Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:42 pm; edited 1 time in total

Notsobusy

Sun, Jul 28 2019, 1:41 pm

Simple1 wrote:

And that's why I think this needs a spinoff. These attitudes can be found in the most successful schools. Maybe less so in the less popular schools. So it's a problem, but threre seems to be no correlation to school closings.

It's true, but it hurts to see money thrown around so easily in this town, but then schools have to close for lack of funds. I know it's not really related, but it's said to watch.