Chabad Consortium Presses Feds for School Funding

The Chabad Consortium of schools, created by the Merkos Chinuch Office to maximize the benefit of Federal educational funding programs at Chabad schools, conducted a series of meetings in Washington DC, on Wednesday and Thursday Jan 25th and 26th. The group was led by Rabbi Nochem Kaplan, director of the Merkos education department and Bryan Kaplan (no relation), a Los Angeles school advocate, who is director and power engine of the Consortium.

Ron Petracca, an attorney at the US Department of Education for Title programs said that even though he has been meeting with education delegations about Federal Title programs for decades; he had “never received as much insight as to how the programs work at ground level”, as he did during this meeting. This comment came after two hours of a scheduled one hour meeting a meeting at the Department of Education. A marathon of four such meetings was conducted at the DOEd, in addition to a meeting with the educational liaison at House Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Canter’s office.

The delegation, which included Dr. Martin Schloss, the head of the Day School department of the NY Board of Jewish Education and representatives of the Hassidic community in Boro Park, met with the heads of the various Title programs, (with a combined budget total of more than 14 billion dollars) to share with them the particular needs of yeshiva students.

Private and parochial schools are prohibited from directly receiving government funding. Schools are however, entitled to receive goods and services. For decades, Jewish schools did not receive the full measure of Federal services to which they are entitled. This is changing rapidly.

Since the creation of the consortium last year, yeshivas in Crown heights have started receiving services which will total more than $1,000,000 this year and as much as $3.4 million next year. The consortium reached out to other yeshivas to assure that they too would be able to maximize their Federal funding potential. More than 10 mosdos in Boro Park (which enroll nearly than10, 000 children) have already joined the consortium.

“These meetings have strengthened our on-going relationship with the leadership at the DOE in Washington and we have great expectations of the future” said Rabbi Kaplan.