Jewish preschools:: Is underfunding sapping their untapped potential?

Fact: Teaching Torah to toddlers can lead to a lifetime of Jewish learning.

Fact: Jewish preschools serve as a gateway to Jewish life for the whole family.

Fact: Despite these realities, borne out by research, preschools are the poor cousins in the Jewish educational family.

Teachers are paid poorly — $19,400 is an average salary, according to one recent report — and few young Jews are going into the field. Job prestige is low and communal support is lackluster. Preschools are the only formal educational venue that is not a direct recipient of Jewish federation dollars, according to a 2002 report of the Jewish Early Childhood Education Partnership.

That is not to say no money is going to preschools; in the Bay Area, for instance, federation dollars go toward curriculum development, teacher training and more. The S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation is creating a scholarship fund for early childhood education that is supposed to be operational for the next school year. And it also provides funding to JCCs for educational programs.

But preschool directors around the country report that resources are being squeezed even as classrooms are bursting with new children.

More than 1,000 schools across the United States educate some 122,500 children, a number that has doubled in the past decade.

Still, changing the name from "preschool" to "early childhood education center" — as many are doing to emphasize that there's nothing "pre" about meeting the developmental needs of 2- to 5-year-olds — hasn't done much to raise the profile of a field that many people still think of as glorified baby-sitting.

In addition, a growing number of experts say a tremendous outreach opportunity is being squandered. The lack of commitment to the world of early childhood education is insulting, wrong and self-defeating, say experts in the field.

Their view is supported by a spate of recent studies showing that Jewish early childhood education not only influences the future course of a child's Jewish development, but can have a profound impact on the Jewish behavior and practice of the entire family.

Rabbi Ed Feinstein, the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, acknowledged both the lack of respect for and the vital role of Jewish early childhood educators at a recent gathering of Reform teachers and directors.

"You're the first adult outside the family a child bonds with, the first professional that will encounter these young families," Feinstein told the 150 women gathered in San Diego earlier this year for the annual conference of the Early Childhood Educators of Reform Judaism.

"Your responsibility is much more than the child. It's to teach the family how to be a family, a Jewish family. That's your sacred responsibility."

The snowball effect is overwhelming, the research shows: Parents of children in Jewish preschools are more likely to join a synagogue, more likely to enroll in adult education courses, and they often begin lighting Shabbat candles and celebrating Jewish holidays at home because of what their kids learn in the classroom.

Conversely, Jewish families with children in nonsectarian preschools tell researchers they celebrate fewer Jewish holidays and feel less involved.

Take Sarah Ritthaler's family. Her 5-year-old son, Daniel, attends preschool at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael. Ritthaler's husband is not Jewish, and a condition of their marriage was that she be allowed to raise the children Jewish.

"My husband didn't know what a sukkah was, and now he's building one in the yard because Daniel at 3 years old came home and said, 'Where's the sukkah?'"

The family also now celebrates Shabbat on Fridays.

"What gives me chills is our son identifying as a Jew. People say, why spend the money at this age? But I'm seeing before my eyes the unfolding of a Jewish soul."

The latest findings on the impact of Jewish preschools, about to be released by the Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education of Greater Philadelphia, surprised even those who directed the study, according to Helene Tigay, the group's executive director.

The study surveyed parents of 4- and 5-year-olds at 25 of the 48 preschools in the greater Philadelphia area. Among the key findings from the 218 survey forms that were returned:

• 70 percent said they are now more aware of the Jewish calendar.

• 62 percent said that engaging in observances that included their children is "more of a priority."

• 51 percent indicated they are "more aware" of positive feelings about being Jewish.

• 41 percent are starting to light Shabbat candles.

• 27 percent have begun attending synagogue services.

The impact on the children themselves is equally dramatic. Kids who go to Jewish preschool have a higher chance of remaining involved in Judaism throughout their lives, says sociologist Steven Cohen of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

In an analysis of the early childhood education data from the 2000-'01 National Jewish Population Survey, directed by United Jewish Communities, the umbrella group of North American Federations, Cohen found that more than 40 percent of Jewish children who go to Jewish preschool continue on to Jewish day school, supplemental Hebrew school and/or Jewish camp.

Rabbi Josh Elkin, executive director of the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, a group focused on day-school education that is looking at the links between day schools and preschools, says that it is clear from research how profound an effect early childhood education can have on a child in general.

While there is a lack of hard data on the Jewish programs, he says, anecdotal evidence shows "there is a lot of hard-wiring of Jewish identity and Jewish values that takes place in many Jewish early childhood programs."

When Fred and Allison Greenbaum moved to Stamford, Conn., they chose their home because it was close to one of the city's best public schools.

But after their oldest son, Richie, spent two and a half years in the Gan Yeladim nursery school run by Chabad-Lubavitch of Stamford, they decided to send him to a nondenominational community day school.

It was obvious, Allison Greenbaum says, that he wanted to be in a Jewish environment.

"We started him in the public school, but he was drawing pictures of boys with kippahs, and he'd point to mountains and say, look, that's Har Sinai," the mountain where the Bible says Moses received the Ten Commandments.

According to CAJE figures in 2004, of the 122,500 children in Jewish preschools, nearly 104,000 are Jewish. According to CAJE figures, one in four Jews under the age of 6 attend a Jewish preschool.

While different studies give different numbers for the under-6 Jewish population in the United States, experts in the field generally cite the CAJE figure of 430,000.

Of the Jewish children in Jewish preschools, 29,000 are in Orthodox schools. Nearly 75,000 are in Conservative, Reform, JCC and other community-run preschools. Many, if not most, of those families are unaffiliated; many observe few if any Jewish rituals at home.

But despite the increased interest and connection to Jewish life that families of preschoolers display, the organized Jewish world isn't following up on that interest, say those involved in the field.

Very few Conservative and virtually no Reform preschools require families to belong to the sponsoring congregation. In contrast, families who enroll their children in a congregation's religious school are expected to be members.

Nancy Bossov, director of early childhood education for the Union for Reform Judaism, estimates that just half the parents of kids in Reform preschools are synagogue members.

Many synagogues, in fact, establish preschools precisely to bring new members into their congregations. Some promote membership by reducing congregational dues for their preschool parents, by including membership in tuition or by giving priority enrollment in the schools to temple members.

Parents might join a synagogue to secure a place for their child in a popular congregational preschool or to receive tuition discounts, but that doesn't mean they stay.

Rabbi Jan Katzew, lifelong Jewish learning director for the URJ, says there is a precipitous drop-off in the Reform community after preschool: 10,000 4-year-olds are enrolled in pre-K classes at Reform congregations around the country, but just 4,000 are enrolled in the first year of religious school.

That's even worse, he says, than the drop-off after bar and bat mitzvahs.

To stem that tide, the Reform movement is developing a continuous curriculum that goes from preschool through seventh grade, to emphasize that preschool is part of a learning process. "If we're going to take Jewish education seriously, it has to be coterminous with Jewish life," he says.

Preschool directors and teachers are often key to helping parents move permanently into the Jewish community — or to driving them, and their children, away.

At the Osher Marin JCC preschool in San Rafael, Director Janet Harris stands in her front lobby every morning to greet the children and their parents. She shakes their hands and personally invites them to the school's family programs.

The preschool is one of 12 involved in a pilot project by the Jewish Early Childhood Education Initiative, launched in 2004 to develop models of preschools that bring the entire family into the project of Jewish learning.

Mark Horowitz, the initiative's executive director, says that each school receives funding and coaching to deepen the Jewish and developmental content in the classrooms, and to build strong relationships with the parents.

"If we can create communities of Jewish families around these preschools, then they will want to continue their connection with Jewish education and institutions," he says. "We will have created a craving for Jewish life. It might mean congregational affiliation, or JCC membership, or Jewish day school — some meaningful way to continue the communities in which they have been flourishing."

The history of Jewish preschools in America shows how things have changed. A handful of preschools were set up in the 1930s to provide working mothers with day care for their children. Those early schools were nondenominational, communal schools, focused more on integrating the children of Jewish immigrants into American culture than instilling Jewish identity, which it was assumed they would get at home.

The first Orthodox and Conservative preschools appeared in the late 1940s and early 1950s, followed later by Reform preschools.

The preschool at Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El in the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood, was set up 45 years ago by young parents who "wanted play opportunities for their children in a Jewish setting," says director Ann Altus. "The goals were different than today — it was to serve members' needs."

Today, when people live far apart rather than in the close-knit Jewish neighborhoods of their grandparents, preschools can fill an important community-building function, she says. Young Jewish parents develop social circles with other parents from their kids' preschools, and that often leads to greater Jewish community involvement.

Early Jewish childhood education experts agree that while a lot more resources need to be invested in bolstering early childhood education and cultivating the families involved, the situation has recently begun to improve.

"The whole field has been elevated significantly in the past three to five years," says Steve Kraus, director of day school, congregational and communal education initiatives at JESNA, the federation system's organization focused on Jewish education.

Cathy Rolland, president of that organization, says 10 years ago she was making $20,000 a year as a preschool director. Today, she says, directors in the larger schools can make $75,000.

"We're finally getting the lay leadership as well as the rabbis to understand that Jewish identity begins with us, not with the religious school. So many of the rabbis are from the old school and don't take us seriously. But we're getting in new young rabbis with families, and it's changing."

The December 2005 Avi Chai study, "Linking the Silos," proposed that federations, philanthropists and Jewish educators work more closely to improve communication between themselves and the entire Jewish educational system, from preschool through adult learning, to capitalize on the momentum created when a child is first placed in Jewish preschool.

Teachers and directors must talk to parents, day-school directors have to talk to preschools, synagogues need to work with federations, and the entire Jewish community needs to recognize how each institution feeds into the next.

And it all begins with the 2-year-olds.

"Preschool directors have the opportunity," says researcher Cohen, "to change these Jewish students' lives."




Teachers, parents of other faiths drawn to Jewish preschools