Lessons in P & A from Parochial Schools

The first time I met with the Planning and Allocations Committee of our local Jewish Federation, they asked me if I had any input for how they worked. I did. "We appreciate the funding," I assured them, "but what about your planning role? Our community has more schools competing for fewer students than a decade ago. This is not sustainable. Aside from setting allocation levels for the coming year, how will you help us restructure the landscape?" In short, whatever happened to the "P" in P&A?

An article in today's New York Times (Cutbacks Part of Plan to Save Parochial Schools) reminds us of how important the communal planning feature is, and how it can and must drive allocations decisions. The Times reports that New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan is strategically closing schools to reduce overheads and centralize the provision of educational services. At the same time, he is diversifying funding arrangements. In the past, each individual parish supported its own local school. Archbishop Dolan's plan is for all 2.5 million "churchgoing Catholics" in the Diocese of New York to share responsibility for funding the education of its roughly 56,000 grade school (K-6) children.

Within the Jewish community, we should be watching this model very carefully to see what happens. Will schools with different cultures compact and enrollment stabilize? Will areas with differential access to wealth really share their resources? Could the American Jewish community accomplish roughly the same feat for our nearly 230,000 day school students? If so, it would certainly require a high degree of centralized planning, appropriate processes for redefining institutional structures and the capacity to distribute resources across multiple schools in a way that aligns with a broader national view of the role of day school education in supporting our Jewish future.

While it's much too early to determine whether Archbishop Dolan's plan will achieve its goals, he certainly has succeeded in an area where we, the Jewish community, have so far failed: He has brought big picture thinking, a clear vision and rational financial models to bear on a larger system of religiously affiliated schools. Far from "parochial," Dolan has put the "P" of planning back into Catholic "P & A."

So should we.