On growing Jewish Day Schools
Some root causes of non-orthodox day school declines and ideas for reversing them
Hi, Ari here. Welcome to my ✨ free bi-weekly ✨ newsletter called The Business of Jewish. Every two weeks I provide an insider/outsider's perspective on the management of professional Jewish organizations.
If you’re not a free subscriber, here are a few of my other articles:
Jewish Day Schools have long been considered a gold standard for Jewish education and engagement. While there are many ways to imbue Jewish values and teach Jewish concepts to our children, there are no other methods that devote as much time as day schools do to Jewish learning. As a result, day schools end up yielding committed Jewish participants, parents, and communal leaders that will help power the next generation of Jewish life.
Unfortunately non orthodox Jewish Day School enrollment has declined over the past 20 years. As documented in this Avichai study from 2019, few regions of the US have been immune from this trend with some regional declines far exceeding the average non orthodox decline of approximately 20%. Given the importance of day schools as a vehicle for Jewish continuity, it’s worth asking what might be driving this trend and what opportunities may exist to reverse it.
Potential causes of non-orthodox day school declines
A decline in the perceived value of Jewish education
Jewish education, not just day schools, have always carried a price tag in excess of free or inexpensive alternatives. The variable that seems to have changed is the value that non-orthodox parents associate with Jewish education. This is not just a day school problem. The Jewish Education Project conducted a study that yielded that from 2006 to 2019 enrollment in supplementary Jewish Education declined by 40%. By most estimates day schools have declined by less than this amount. Regardless, there seems to be a decline in the perceived value of Jewish education across the board, which puts a damper on the ability of schools to recruit new families.
The high perceived price of day schools
This is perhaps the most obvious challenge. The full price of Day school can be upwards of $15,000 and sometimes as much as $40,000-$50,000 per year depending on the region of the country. Public education, on the other hand, remains free and very few states offer voucher programs that defray the cost of day schools. Day schools mitigate this challenge through tuition assistance, but a study we conducted in Boston showed that parents routinely underestimate their ability to get assistance as well as underestimate the amount they will receive. This in turn contributes to a perception that day schools are socioeconomically homogenous or even elitist which is an additional turn off for many families.
The conflicting incentives of feeder schools
Jewish preschools are the most likely source for Jewish day school leads. They are institutions that are more likely to attract committed Jewish parents and thus contain a more concentrated population for marketing purposes. Here in Boston we’ve estimated that 20%+ of Jewish preschool parents send their kids to a Jewish day school which far exceeds the 7% of families sending their kids to a day school from preschools overall.
Unfortunately the conflicting incentives of Jewish preschools often get in the way of advocacy for day schools. The majority of preschools are housed inside of synagogues that have their own religious school and have their own synagogue membership base to grow. A family “lost” to day school means a synagogue will not attract those tuition dollars for their religious school and may lose out on membership revenue. Although many mission based preschools support day schools, often financial incentives combined with the effort of teaming up can get in the way of effective partnerships.
A long multi-year sales cycle
Day school choice is a long and considered decision. The same previously referenced study conducted here in Boston showed that parents make the day school decision over a multi-year timeframe that often starts even before they have kids. As a result schools are forced to grapple with how to pitch their product to parents whose mindset shifts rapidly from pre-kids to infant to toddler and beyond. Long sales cycles of this kind require expansive and challenging investments for admission teams.
The lack of targeted, scalable, and cost efficient channels
Even if the will and succinct message existed to market day schools it’s very hard to know where to market them. Jewish families compromise a relatively small percentage of the local population and among those families an even smaller percent would consider day schools. The typical scalable marketing channels people turn to like Google, Facebook, and Instagram do not offer the capability to target Jewish families (with good reason), and so marketers are left trying to tap into lower volume channels that are often hard to identify and harder to grow. When coupled with limited marketing budgets, there are finite tools at the disposal of most marketing leads to attempt to move the needle.
The challenge of channel attribution
Because the sales cycle for Jewish families is so long, even if scalable channels did exist, it would be very challenging to properly attribute the impact of different marketing sources. Admission leads routinely ask ‘How did you hear about us’, but the typical family who arrives for a tour has had many different influencers that got them to that point. As a result of this dynamic it’s very difficult to tell how to appropriately distribute investment across marketing channels based on what has worked in the past.
What we can do about it
Intentionally invest in a plan
Because there is no playbook for day school marketing and incremental tactics seem insufficient it is even more important that school heads and boards consider holding admission/marketing leads accountable for a well thought through plan. The same way boards hold teams accountable for a refreshed development strategy or financial aid strategy, they could be asking for a formal differential approach to admissions and marketing at the beginning of the school year. This plan shouldn’t just include a calendar of open houses and events, but instead include a learning agenda that documents a set of hypotheses for change and resulting actions that are distinct from what has been attempted in the past. With board buy-in, day schools could invest dollars against this plan the same way they do other areas of investment.
Arm yourself for a long sales cycle
The expectation should not be quick wins. Yes, day schools will benefit from families moving to town who are by default interested in day schools, but less opportunistic marketing will require years of prospect cultivation. As a result day school admission/marketing leads need rope from their boards to build multi-year strategies. These strategies could be metric based, but those metrics should be more than just families who show up for tours. Other leading indicators could be non current day school families who turn up for events or perhaps email/phone interactions with prospective families even if they don’t immediately turn into tours. It’s worthwhile getting creative to figure out which leading indicators could be seen as positive progress.
To complement the long sales cycle, schools might benefit from tools to track families over a long arch. Traditional small business sales CRMs (Customer Relationship Management tools) like Hubspot, Pipedrive, or Zoho all have reasonable non profit price tiers. There are even existing education-specific solutions like Salesforce Education cloud, Blackbaud CRM, or RenWeb some of which schools may already be using for non admission purposes. In addition to enabling tracking, these tools offer robust systems to mark interactions with specific families and allow admission teams to better align around family-specific plans for marketing.
Create value oriented channels that promote feeling day school
Schools need to think creatively about how to drive families into their funnel and get them to move beyond simply hearing day school and into “seeing and feeling” day school. There is a reason schools typically invest in holiday programming and in other vehicles to get people in their buildings.
The question is how schools might evolve these programs and build their brands as communal hubs that attract non day school families to non-school events.
Schools could assess the full calendar to find pockets of time where they can create value for families - Weekends, afterschool, holidays, or even the summer. These are all periods where young families may have slack in their schedule and are looking to fill that time with an entertaining or somehow enriching activity. These are active opportunities to get families into a day school’s building, interacting with its staff, and meeting current day school families.
The Hannah Senesh community day school in Brooklyn serves as an illustrative example of an institution that has branded non-school events and attempted to serve non day school families with their Senesh L’Kulam programming. This programming requires additional staff and the mindshare of existing staff to pull off. It leverages the school’s #1 asset which are the educators it employs and makes them external facing. All of this requires deliberate investment of both time and dollars. Questions like how these programs are staffed, how they are marketed, and how participation is tracked are all necessary strategic complements to the programming itself.
Own the preschool funnel
The vexing preschool disincentives described above have increasingly been countered by day schools creating preschools of their own. Following the theme of moving past merely learning and jumping into “seeing and feeling” day school, preschool is an incredible opportunity to achieve a See/Feel level of engagement. What better way to get families in the building and experience the culture than to have them drop their kids off every day at the school, get to know other preschool families, and take part in day school events. This is of course a significant investment, but also a very strategic one.
Simplify price and make it transparent
I’ve written previously on this topic, but day schools don’t do themselves any favors by publishing full pay prices that <50% of families pay and not screaming to the mountain tops the % of families that receive assistance and the amount a typical family receives. In addition to less subtly marketing financial aid schools can benefit by dramatically simplifying their process and even simplifying their pricing. The past 10-15 years have seen the emergence of middle income programs that create grids that show AGI and number of kids in a matrix that allows parents to see what they will pay. Unfortunately these middle income programs typically only cover <20% of tuition assistance programs and the remaining families are forced to go through the more opaque traditional financial aid process.
Get comfortable using intuition for attribution
The theoretically easy solution to the aforementioned attribution challenge is to use your own intuition. There may not be much of an alternative given the complexity of the day school decision for prospective families. If a family attended a day school event but also has a deep friend network of other day school families it’s less likely to be the event that drove them to apply. On the other hand, if a family’s day school network is limited and they started to come to day school events maybe the attribution should be the event. The most we can do is keep track of this intuition based approach and look back at the end of an admission cycle to see which sources worked better than others to adjust accordingly.
Leverage common marketing content
While every day school market is unique in terms of price point, geography, competition, and many other factors there may be common ways for schools to go on the offensive. The latest version of potential common marketing in the wake of 10/7 is “day schools as the antidote to anti-semitism”. It could be some combination of day schools as a safe refuge and day school graduates as the voice of the next generation of students on college campuses. There may be an opportunity for an umbrella organization to do the research and subsequently create white labeled marketing materials that day schools can use for themselves.
Conclusion
Growing day schools is by no means easy work. Macro level mindset changes among the average Jewish parent alone is a hard force to counter. With reduced scale day schools have less resources to spend on both talent and the marketing itself, which makes the prospect of coming up with and executing on a plan more difficult. An incredible amount of philanthropy has been injected into day schools to make them more affordable and/or make them more excellent. Our schools have spent less capital trying to figure out how and where to tell their story. If we accept that the challenges of day school marketing are deep and intractable and require non-incremental solutions, we might stomach the will to properly invest in growing this indispensable Jewish institution.
If you’re finding this free newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
In my lifetime my views have evolved based upon my personal experiences. Now, my work is assisting to lead a Jewish Day School north of Boston (Epstein Hillel). I sometimes work with Ari in his role assisting Jewish Day Schools to deal with all of the issues he describes so well in this and prior articles.
I differ about what's needed for non-Orthodox Jewish to succeed going forward. I started as an affluent, but house poor Jewish Dad who relied on his large and affluent Conservative synagogue for my daughters' Jewish education. But over time the synagogue "dumbed down" its religious school to attract less traditional families and meet some parents' demands for more time to pursue extracurriculars. I saw how as a result my children were less well prepared for their Bat Mitzvahs, and while I tutored my kids to bring them up to speed, I noticed the trend towards the chanting of partial Haftorahs and reduced service participation, and also changes in the post Bar/Bat Mitzvah study programs to make them more popular, but less educational.
As a result I started to look at Jewish Day Schools, but quickly reached the conclusion that while these would address my concerns, that I'd need to move to a less expensive home in order to afford them. I was considered too affluent for significant tuition assistance. Since I lived in a community with excellent public schools, it was easy to justify a decision just to stay with the public schools, and to rely on Jewish overnight camps, etc.
Now I live in a community where even the synagogues are struggling to support their religious schools. Unless you live close to a major city, the only options for excellent Jewish and secular education is at a school like where I work. But while all of Ari's barriers to increased attendance are real, I'm quite certain that the largest barrier to increased attendance is the high tuition cost, which is necessitated by the need to somehow balance the school's budget.
After October 7th, it has become even clearer how important Jewish Day Schools are to preparing the next generation of Jewish leaders, equipped with superb training in Judaism and Jewish values. The Jewish community's priority should be to dramatically increase the numbers of Jewish Day School students...a moonshot...by 2 or 3 times the current numbers. I personally believe that if tuition could be set much lower, say $5000/year vs. $30,000/year (or more) that this could be done.
But how to fund this? I believe that the money is already there. Our federations with multi-billion dollar balance sheets and large campaigns need to change their priorities/allocations, away from other agencies, and perhaps even away from Israel in order to support the schools. We need changes in laws in order to support school choice and vouchers. And we need to educate our most affluent donors that support of Jewish Day Schools is the single best way to support Jewish continuity. We needn't look far (Montreal or Toronto) to see how this might all work.
Time is of the essence. The steps Ari describes are smart but will take time. But the current moment demands boldness, and bold leaders willing to step up and to change the current paradigm. We really can do better than the status quo.