Lakewood, NJ’s girls’ elementary schools could face a delayed start to the new academic year as the community’s rabbonim weigh reinstating a longstanding policy under which no school would open its doors until every girl had secured a placement.
The possible move comes with just 21 girls still without schools — a dramatic improvement from the approximately 60 unresolved cases that remained only weeks ago.
Considerable work by local askanim, together with extensive cooperation from the schools themselves, has succeeded in finding places for dozens of children despite an acute shortage of available classroom space.
Yet the final 21 cases have proved particularly difficult. With many schools already operating at or near capacity, finding appropriate places for the remaining girls has become increasingly challenging as the opening of the school year approaches.
Against that backdrop, Lakewood’s rabbonim are understood to be giving serious consideration to a step that would immediately change the equation: girls’ schools would be instructed not to begin the new year until the placement crisis has been resolved in its entirety.
The idea is hardly new to Lakewood.
For many years, during the lifetime of Rav Matisyahu Solomon zt”l, the mashgiach of Bais Medrash Govoah, the community operated under precisely such an understanding. Schools could not simply begin the year while children elsewhere in Lakewood remained without classrooms to enter.
The arrangement placed a collective responsibility upon the community’s mosdos. An unresolved placement was consequently not regarded merely as the problem of one family or one school; the schools were expected to work together before the academic year could get under way.
That policy was eventually discontinued, but with the new school year now imminent and 21 girls still awaiting placements, its return is once again under serious discussion.
Reinstating the policy would place considerable pressure on schools already struggling with severe space constraints. At the same time, those advocating its return hope that the prospect of a community-wide delay could produce the additional cooperation necessary to resolve the remaining cases.
Should the rabbonim decide to proceed, the message would be unmistakable: Lakewood’s girls’ schools will begin the new year together — but only once every girl has a school to attend.
{Matzav.com}
