A successful rollout?

While free preschool is welcomed by many economically disadvantaged residents of Jerusalem, there are still reservations.

By SAM SOKOL
Preschool 521 (photo credit: Reuters)
Preschool 521
(photo credit: Reuters)
Acrash program to open new preschools to accommodate an influx of pupils following the introduction of free preschooling in the city is gaining steam, municipal officials say, but the slow pace of preparations in some neighborhoods has some parents worried.
Among concerns by local residents: the lack of classrooms in Arab neighborhoods of the capital; classrooms that have yet to be built a week before the school year begins; overcrowded classrooms and the fate of private schools in the face of municipal competition.
Rachel Selby, a mother from Baka, contacted In Jerusalem with pictures of an empty lot in her neighborhood where municipality officials say a preschool is set to begin operating next week. As of earlier this week, there was neither a preschool nor a playground.
Municipality workers say that a prefabricated structure should be on site by the time school begins, but local parents are worried.
Devora Givati, who heads the municipality’s state preschools division, says that while there are “difficulties” in implementing the government initiative in the short time frame required, the situation in Baka is an isolated case and not one pupil will be without a school.
Asked where the municipality will find enough teachers to cope with the influx of new pupils, Givati explains that the city “has enough teachers.”
“Some will be teachers [hired] from private preschools, because they will have fewer children [enrolled now] and they have requested to join the state system. Others will be teachers who have previously worked on rotation as substitute teachers. We are enlisting all of these women, who have worked for several years in a different preschool every day, to work as full-time teachers with their own pupils.”
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet recently approved a plan to provide free preschool education to all children ages three and up. Netanyahu’s initiative is really the implementation of the 1984 Compulsory Education Act, which mandated free education beginning at age three. Until now, the law’s implementation had been repeatedly blocked by a Finance Ministry unwilling to bear the cost.
The new/old initiative, having been approved only weeks prior to the beginning of the academic year, has required the Jerusalem Municipality to embark on a crash program to create the infrastructure necessary to enroll all of the new pupils who will be flooding the state school system.
Last year, state preschool cost NIS 790 a month, with an extra fee for the after-school program. This year, like kindergarten for five-year-olds, the morning program will be free. Many children attend private preschools, which are eligible to receive non-profit status for their pupils to receive the NIS 790 discount.
While there have been reports of difficulties springing up due to the rush in which all of the preparatory work must be completed, it seems that the city has implemented Netanyahu’s program fairly well and that there will be enough classrooms to accommodate almost all of the new pupils.
According to the municipality, in the upcoming school year Jerusalem will open 54 new preschools for children aged three and four. This, says city spokeswoman Leelach Avidov, is the “largest number in the country.”
Ninety-eight percent of the children in this age range currently enrolled in preschools in the secular and state religious tracks, “where there is a major demand for urban preschools, will be absorbed in the municipality framework,” Avidov says. “It comes out to more than 1,000 new pupils.”
While insiders have admitted that the rollout will not be quite as successful in the eastern half of Jerusalem as in western neighborhoods, since there are “separate issues” in east Jerusalem, the municipality says that “another 700 pupils from the Arab denomination and 1,000 children from the ultra-Orthodox denomination will be absorbed in the municipality preschools.”
EAST JERUSALEM, however, may not be receiving the same number of preschools as west Jerusalem. The educational system in the eastern side of the city has been problematic for several years. According to a recent report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), in 2011 “there was a NIS 10.6 million budget gap between the budget necessary for this purpose and the budget actually given to the official Arab schools. In response, the municipality said that the calculations, which, as aforesaid, were made by the municipality’s own professional body, were inaccurate, were unprofessional and could not serve as the basis of a ‘real’ financial demand.”
Moreover, ACRI asserts, “Along with the severe shortage of classrooms in the east Jerusalem school system there is also a severe shortage of professional personnel, including educational advisers, psychologists and inspectors.”
Given the past discrimination against Jerusalem’s Arab residents and the fact that the municipality spokesman did not provide any substantive information on efforts to build classrooms in east Jerusalem, it is impossible to tell what real steps are being taken, in the context of Netanyahu’s new initiative, to equalize educational opportunities between pupils on the east and west sides of the nation’s capital.
Part of the issue, ACRI’s Ronit Sela says, is that when information pertaining to registering in municipal schools for the 2012-2013 school year was initially posted online, the fact that preschool was now free was only advertised in Hebrew and not in Arabic, leaving residents of east Jerusalem out in the cold. The city, she says, jumped to change this after ACRI publicized the change on Army Radio.
“There are only six [new] municipal preschools for ages three and four in east Jerusalem compared to 66 [new] in west Jerusalem,” Sela says. Of 15,000 Arab children aged three and four, only 433 of them (less than 3%) attended official preschools or were placed with older children in kindergartens in the 2011-12 school year, and an additional 260 children that age attended recognized but unofficial kindergartens. Many others attended [preschools in] private frameworks, but the authorities do not keep track of them so no data are available.”
Sela believes that not enough is being done to build adequate facilities for the capital’s Arab citizens.
“Some parents who tried to register their children were turned down and told there was simply not enough room, despite the government decision.”
“It’s important to add that all this is happening against the backdrop of dire poverty,” she notes.
“Eighty-four percent of Palestinian children in Jerusalem live below the poverty line, according to the most recent statistics published by the National Insurance Institute.”
Sela believes that what the municipality is doing is not enough and is certainly not being done in a fair or equitable way.
“We know that some of the private kindergartens have asked for recognition following the government decision.
However, the municipality did not have numbers last we asked them – neither of the number of institutions nor the number of children they will be able to accommodate.”
This, Sela says, must change.
WHERE WILL all these new pupils go? Rachel Azaria, who held the early childhood education portfolio at the municipality until her recent dismissal, explains that Jerusalem had a preexisting infrastructure that was adaptable to the influx of new pupils.
“Up to now the law required that every five-year-old child be in a state kindergarten, but the three- and fouryear- old children, if the municipality made sure there was a building and to organize [preschools for them], part of the funding came from the government.”
“Some municipalities said, ‘It’s important for us to provide this as an option to every resident in our city, to send their children to one of these state preschools for three- and four-year-olds,’ and some said, ‘I don’t have to so I’m opening the five-year-olds’ kindergarten and if there is a little room maybe the younger children can join in.’ Tel Aviv was one of those that said they don’t feel obligated, and many others municipalities were that way.
“Years ago, Jerusalem had already decided that everyone who wants to go to a state preschool would be able to go to a state preschool. Not everyone wanted to because it wasn’t free and it only cost a little less than the private preschools,” she explains.
“But all of the basis to build it was there. What that means is that now that preschool is free and many more people want to come now... they are building a lot of preschools and turning other buildings into preschools.
It is something that is doable in Jerusalem and next year probably everyone, or nearly everyone, who wants to be in a municipal preschool will be able to sign up and his child will get a place.”
ASKED IF every child will have a place in a state preschool this year, Azaria says, “There will be room. There will be classrooms. It’s not always perfect, there are issues,” but there will be enough to go around.
“Even before the Trajtenberg recommendations [for socioeconomic reform, which were published a year ago], the system had already expanded by 1,000 pupils.
Part of this is natural growth in the city of Jerusalem – which is, in and of itself, a happy matter. Some of the new pupils will be placed in existing preschools and the number of children in the institutions will be increased.
[For example, instead of 26 children in a preschool there will be 29.]” “We are opening 29 new classrooms. Fifteen will be state religious schools and 14 will be state secular schools. Since it is impossible to build classrooms in half a year, we have found solutions in already existing structures that are being revamped to be utilized as schools.”
“For example,” she continues, “in the years in which there was a drop in the number of pupils in certain neighborhoods, like Gilo and Kiryat Hayovel, the classrooms were given to other municipal bodies. Some were converted into community centers and some into other types of educational facilities, among other uses. Now that there is an increase in the number of pupils, the municipality is finding other solutions for the bodies that were operating in the classrooms and are renovating the preschools so that they can be ready for the use of the children.”
The 29 new classrooms Azaria mentions do not include classrooms for haredi or Arab preschools, which will have their own separate programs within the municipality.
Other solutions include the use of “buildings that had been erected for the use of the city’s population by the municipality, which are being re-purposed for use as preschools.” An example of this is the youth movement building in the neighborhood of Har Homa.
RESPONDING TO concerns that have been raised regarding the city’s ability to accommodate all the children whose parents will want to send them to city schools, Givati replies that as far as she is concerned, “there will not be one pupil in the city of Jerusalem who will request to attend a preschool and will not receive an education.”
However, she continues, that does not mean children will always be placed in the schools that their parents request. While she says that no parents will be forced to travel outside their neighborhoods, their children might not be assigned to a school on the specific street that they wanted.
“The child might not receive admission to the specific school that he wants. Someone who comes today and says, ‘I was not accepted to a private preschool and I want to return to the municipal preschool framework’ or wants to be accepted for any other reason, we will receive him but will not guarantee that he will be admitted to the specific preschool he wants on the exact street that he requests,” she explains.
Givati admits that despite her optimism and happiness with the rollout of the free education initiative thus far, there are still some obstacles.
“One of the difficulties is that there may be parents who have registered their child [for a preschool] in a specific location and we will [have to] send the child to another place, even if that place is on the same street.”
While there will be enough classrooms for all the pupils, she says, there will not be enough to guarantee all parents their first choice of schools.
DESPITE THE obstacles, the Jerusalem Municipality claims to have done a better job than many critics would have expected at increasing capacity to make room for the influx of new pupils. Whether or not this new program will be beneficial, only time will tell. The city is optimistic it can make it work and that the program will greatly help the people of Jerusalem.
However, not everyone is so confident.
Rebecca Zibman is a young American immigrant who runs a preschool in Jerusalem. She says that she believes the new plan will bring with it certain difficulties.
“I understand that child care can be extremely expensive, and that the expense often prohibits a parent (usually the mother) from returning to work sooner,” she says. However, “Our music teacher informed me that several ganim [preschools] and mishpahtonim [day cares] in the area are not filling up for this coming year. This includes places for children under three. Free gan for more kids certainly isn’t helping these private places, but I believe it is also a sign that living costs in Jerusalem are still much too high for most young families and that they are leaving the city.
“I live in Jerusalem because I am a young Anglo single, and this is where the best community is for me, but I can’t say I’ll manage to stay here for long after getting married one day,” she says. “While my friend and I established our gan together in Jerusalem, the idea is that we’ll run it long enough to gain a reputation and then move the gan (whether it be to another or two different locations) to where we find ourselves living outside of Jerusalem.”
Zibman is doubtful that private preschools will do well with the new initiative, despite government assurances that they will be able to integrate into the free state school system.
“Honestly, we are not so confident. It is going to hurt us,” she says.
“Something that is important to understand about the private ganim/mishpahtonim in Israel is that most are not registered with the government.”
The government bureaucracy, she continues, makes it nearly impossible to make existing preschools legal, let alone to get them accepted to the free preschool program.
“Tamat [the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry, which oversees places with children under three] makes it extremely difficult to meet their requirements. To make things more complicated, each area is overseen by a rakezet [coordinator]. We were informed by our local rakezet that due to budget cuts, she was unable to take on additional ganim despite there being a shortage in the area. My former boss was kind enough to introduce me to the person from the municipality in charge of Jerusalem mishpahtonim who cheerily told me how easy it is to be legal. I responded that it was nearly impossible.”
The new program “puts some parents in a tough situation,” she says. While private school tuition is expensive, “parents are alarmed by the huge classes in state gan and feel they would be hurting their child by subjecting them to that environment. [A large class] can be really overwhelming. But it’s still a tough decision.”