How do we get today’s time-starved, stressed-out, screen-addicted teens to engage with their Jewish heritage?   Maybe, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz learned, an answer has been right here where we are all along, we just weren’t seeing it.  That’s one of the possibilities raised at the recent annual conference of the North American Association of Community and Congregational Hebrew High Schools (NAACCHHS) in Memphis, TN.  Now in its 10th year, NAACCHHS is a network of supplemental Jewish content-based schools and experiential programs for Jewish adolescents.  The participants, directors representing 18 different Jewish programs in 12 states, shared best practices, and participated in learning sessions with scholars, educators and facilitators from Memphis and beyond.  The conference focused on engaging Jewish teens in tikkun olam with service learning, social action, and values clarification through a Jewish lens. The learning also addressed how to use the resources and history of each community to link teens to both today’s contemporary issues and their own history.
The Memphis NAACCHHS conference used the history of Memphis and its Jewish community as a laboratory to explore dynamic ways to engage teens in exploring their own identity and acting on important issues in the contemporary world.  “Memphis is the most Jewish city I’ve ever lived in and I’ve lived in Tel Aviv” said Penina Hoffnung, a NAACCHHS board member whose institution, Beth Sholom Synagogue, hosted the event.  “Some terrible, tragic things have happened in this city, but it rises up and works to overcome that past—that’s exactly what we want to convey to teens about their own Jewish heritage.”  The participants toured the Civil Rights Museum having first had an introduction to the Jewish context from a member of the Jewish Historical Society of Memphis and the Mid-South.  The presenter grew up in a racially segregated Memphis and shared the Jewish experience during the civil rights era. NAACCHHS members also visited Memphis’ famed Beale Street.  This included learning about the historic preservation at the Blues Foundation.  “The history of Memphis is rich and unique,” explained Shari Weinberger, NAACCHHS’ director, “and creating dynamic learning experience based on local history—that’s something that can be replicated no matter where you live.”
With help from local storyteller and historical documentarian Lynnie Mirvis, the participants learned the biographies of some the Memphis Jewish community’s upstanders during the 1960s. In other sessions, participants shared ways they were connecting teens to older generations via joint inter-generational learning programs as part of the NAACCHHS cooperative arrangement with the Better Together project. 
Facilitators from “Facing History and Ourselves” offered samples of how to utilize first person histories from eras like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement to direct and deepen teens’ personal identity, values and motivations.  They suggested various ways to engage teens with true-life stories from their own heritage and community.  Robyn Faintich from the Good People Fund offered guidance on ways to actualize values that bubble up from these inquiries.
 “The 2013 Pew Portrait of American Jews noted that most American Jews identify most strongly with the Jewish historical past.  That same study showed that living an ethical life was how they identified as Jewish,” said Phyllis Blinik-Thomas, NAACCHHS president and director of the Mercaz program of Cincinnati, OH.   “Our conference explored ways to connect teens to that history and turn that connection into acting proactively and Jewishly on issues most important to them. “
NAACCHHS itself has adjusted its conferences so that its members learn through engagement with local history.  “We used to have our conference at Brandeis, AJU, Pearlstone,” noted Shari Weinberger, NAACCHHS director, “but we never connected with the places where we were meeting.  Now we are moving to a model where NAACCHHS members host the conference. Where we are meeting becomes an integral factor.” 
“That’s where the whole idea of the Memphis conference started, “agreed Hoffnung.  “We held our conference last year in Providence, RI.  And the organizing committee chose the theme of religious freedom which was intrinsic to the founding of Rhode Island.  We explored what ‘religious freedom’ means today to teens.  We visited the capitol, read the state charter, and met with an inspirational young Jewish legislator.  All that informed our time together enormously.  When the time came to pick the next location, I offered Memphis.  The thematic connection its history and social action was a natural.”
Already member schools are implementing some of what they discussed at the conference.  Many report fine tuning their social action programming to be less of a one shot program, to something that is more deeply connected and generated by the teens’ own values and priorities.  All in ways that make the connection with local social action organizations deeper and more ongoing—a relationship rather than a sound bite.   One community is adding a class about local history.  There are invaluable resources in our communities.  As Dorothy said, when looking to engage teens in Jewish living, “there’s no place like home.”

Supplemental community and congregational Hebrew high schools are key to building a vibrant Jewish future. These schools help solidify strong Jewish identity in teens, so that when they leave their communities for college and realms beyond, they have a firm understanding of who they are and where they come from. In these schools, students work with engaged teachers from a diverse cross section of their Jewish community. They hang out with other Jewish teens with multiple points of view. They build self-esteem, learn to share ideas, to listen, to synthesize information, work collaboratively and become leaders. Supplemental Hebrew high schools help foster the values and behaviors we hope for in adult members of our Jewish communities.

The numbers of teens in supplemental Jewish schools is at a dangerously low level. In the school year 2006-2007, the total population was 8130 students in 48 NAACCHHS schools. By the 2012-2013 school year, that number had fallen to 3141 students in 33 schools. This year, 2013-2014, isn’t looking much better.

But instead of synagogues, youth movements, Federations and other Jewish communal institutions coming together, we splinter and compete for teens: each institution with its own teen program. A better solution would be to use community Hebrew high schools as the launching pad to propelling Jewish teens into a meaningful Jewish adulthood.

Community Hebrew high schools provide places not only for teens to meet, but also for community rabbis to teach together, for diverse community members to participate on boards and for a broad selection of parents to interact. Yet in order for community Hebrew high schools to survive into the future, they need access to potential families way before bar mitzvah age, and many congregations are not eager to grant this access. All Hebrew high directors are in unanimous agreement that recruitment needs to begin well before 7th grade. The whole community needs to work together to make sure that youth are excited to walk through the doors of these great programs.

Let’s not succumb to despair, division, dumbing-down and disillusion.  Rather, let’s foster an environment in which synagogue rabbis, Jewish educators and classroom religious school teachers begin early to tell parents and families how great these high school programs are. Let parents start dreaming when their children are in fifth grade, fourth grade, even third grade, about the innovative, engaging and relevant programs awaiting their children when they become teens.  Let’s create communal norms in which the Jewish involvement of our teens is a status symbol.

Often parents say their teens just can’t handle the stress of both academic excellence and extracurricular activities chosen for how good they will look on a college application. It may not occur to these parents and teens that participation in Hebrew high school is exactly the sort of activity that impresses college admissions officers. Wouldn’t it be great if cocktail party bragging from parents of teens was not only about what sports teams they played on but also about the engaging ideas their teen brought home from that week’s classes at Hebrew high school?

Too many teens don’t know what they’re missing. Our Hebrew high schools are full of dynamic, interactive, deeply thought-provoking programming led by creative and charismatic educators.  If we start early and keep strong in our message of how Jewish educational programming can enrich and help our teens. We can engage Jewish teens’ lives in meaningful ways that best form the basis of lifetime involvement. In fact, many teens find that their involvement in Hebrew high schools provides just the opposite of a stressor. They say that their few hours a week at Hebrew high school are the one time in their week where they find an island of sanity and can be themselves.

What is needed is a collaborative approach. Where it is not YOUR teens and THEIR teens but OUR teens. Where supplemental Hebrew high schools work together with youth groups. Where Jewish Family Service supports teens and their families through joint programming with schools. Where Federations back community-wide efforts by knocking down obstacles. Educating teens is not a money maker. The tuition for these programs in most communities covers only 50% of the cost, but if a community values its future and the future of the Jewish people, educating teens seems like a mighty good place to invest.

Shari Weinberger is Director of NAACCHHS. For more information about NAACCHHS, email shari@naacchhs.org or visit their facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/411220532255223/

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There have been a flurry of articles and blog-posts this summer about Hebrew schools and their efficacy. Meanwhile, enrollment in post-bnai mitzvah programs in synagogues and community schools has been steadily declining across the country. Professionals in the field have been working hard to figure out the why’s, where’s, and what-can-we-do’s. Some reasons posited have been lack of parental commitment, synagogue membership decline, lack of community support or funding, over-programming of teens and the high cost of teen programming.

Recently the North American Association of Community and Congregational High Schools (NAACCHHS) ran a survey to ascertain how expensive Hebrew high school tuition is nationwide and to gauge cost as a factor in plummeting enrollment. Currently there are 38 NAACCHHS member schools. Our representative sample came from 31 of them, representing a wide range of Jewish communities from across the continent, with a wide range of enrollment, ranging from large to small. The information gleaned from this survey helps us understand how much it costs for teens to participate in supplemental teen Jewish education.

There is a huge range in the cost of supplemental Hebrew high schools. One school offers the program for free to participating synagogue members. The most expensive school charges $2994. The median annual tuition was $819.

Most programs run for a full school year (25 – 30 weeks) and require families to pay for a full year of tuition. While many schools offer payment plans and financial aid, families are still required to pay for the whole year, regardless of how many times a student attends. And while most programs are similar in the number of weeks they meet during the year they differ in the number of hours classes are held each week. The majority (2/3) run two-hour programs, but some are one hour programs and some offer as many as 7.5 hours of class per week. In order to compare tuition more fairly, the tuition data was adjusted for a two-hour program. Adjusting for a two-hour program, the schools who responded have a median tuition of $634. Whether we adjust the figures for two hours or look at the actual hours a school program meets, the mean and mode stayed the same at $513 and $500 respectively.

In looking for patterns, there were few to be found.  The most expensive program did not mean the program with the most hours or the most students. While the least expensive program has only 15 students, the third least expensive has 59 students and the fourth least expensive has 70. Similarly, while the most expensive program has 365 students, the second most expensive has only 40 students. The more expensive programs seemed to be coastal with NY/NJ metro area, Philadelphia and south Florida topping the east coast, and LA and the Bay Area topping the west coast. This makes sense when the high cost of living in these areas is taken into account.

The cost of tuition does not reflect on the quality of the program. All NAACCHHS schools offer a wide range of classes and an endless array of topics and subjects. Many offer Hebrew for either high school or college credit. In addition to classes, many programs include perks such as trips, retreats, college tutoring, driving classes and counseling.

So why is there such a differential in tuition? Only five of the 31 programs responded that their program is fully funded by tuition.  Most schools receive an allocation from the community and do additional fundraising. Some do substantial fundraising. However, the five whose programs are fully-funded by tuition were not the most expensive, and ran the full range with tuition from as low as $360 to as high as $800.

NAACCHHS is further investigating the correlation between the per-student budget cost and tuition, and also how the number of hours a director works correlates to the cost of tuition.

Tuition cost was not found to be a factor in family decisions to enroll teens in Jewish supplemental education. Even low-cost programs are experiencing declining student enrollment numbers. As overall affiliation declines, so too do the number of teens entering programs from “feeder” synagogue religious schools. To this end, in the coming weeks, NAACCHHS directors will be discussing strategies to recruit students from unaffiliated households.

About: NAACCHHS is a professional organization of directors of Jewish supplemental teen educational programs. In its 8th year, NAACCHHS is an invaluable resource for community and congregational Hebrew high schools. With representation from all corners of the continent and plenty of cities in the places in between, NAACCHHS provides professional development and support. With an active listserv and curriculum bank, NAACCHHS supports school and program directors, including mentoring for new members, weekly conference calls, monthly webinars and an annual in-person conference.

For more information about NAACCHHS membership, or about this survey, please direct your questions to Shari Weinberger, NAACCHHS Director, or visit our facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/411220532255223/

- See more at: http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/what-is-the-cost-of-supplemental-hebrew-high-school/#sthash.tSEOw0DN.dpuf