With all the hoopla in the current government about the importance of charedi schools providing a core curriculum to their male high school students, something I haven’t seen mentioned is cost.
In dollars and cents(shekels and agurot?) it’s been ignored that It costs a lot of money to send a son to a charedi high school with a full bagrut curriculum. A lot more than a typical charedi yeshiva and both yeshivas are more than the fully government funded public high schools. The annual tuition for our ds15 is $8820. Remember, this is an Israeli school and parents aren’t making American salaries.
Unlike in the US, there are no scholarships through the schools, not merit based nor need based. However, I was told by someone who sends her son to the particular school that my son is at that there’s a private outside organization that financially assists families to some degree with tuition. This was also mentioned in the form letter sent to everyone at the beginning of the year, so I asked the secretary about it. She told me that it will take a couple of months until the scholarship process for the year begins and in the meantime you pay full tuition. I told her that if someone needs a scholarship that would imply they don’t have the means to pay full tuition but she said that’s how it is.
So that’s what we did and for five months didn’t hear anything about this. When asked how people afford this I really didn’t have a good answer. Then a couple of weeks ago the secretary called and told us that ds15 and dh needed to be in Jerusalem for the interview and testing (3 hour test for ds) a day later. It was changed to the following week (naturally we were notified the evening before the appointment – this ‘wait a long time and hurry up at the last minute’ seems to be a way things are commonly done here).
There are a number of factors that they take into account when determing how much of a grant to give towards each student’s education – family size, income, extentuating cirumstances and how well the student does on the testing. The interviewer had already knew about ds15’s academic performance in school and when ds finished his testing, he thanked the proctor. The proctor told him – in all seriousness – that if a person says ‘thank you’ he has 5 points automatically added to his final grade! Who knew that teaching your child to be polite and appreciative would also be financially helpful? 🙂
If you’re granted a scholarship, you pay a reduced amount to the school and this private organization pays the balance to the school. So the school is paid fully whether you get this grant or not. We were offered a generous scholarship and that means that over the past five months we’ve already paid our annual tuition through the end of the year! I’m so grateful that an organization like this is available – this tuition expense has been a big pressure for us and did I mention I’m so grateful? 🙂
Avivah
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