Education partnership makes "painful" decision to cut special needs unit


An unnamed teenage "buddy" from Central Hebrew High School,
left, plays with Hannah Goldstein and Jonah Friedman at the Yaldeinu
program. Jonah is the son of Rabbi Avi Friedman of the Summit Jewish
Community Center. Photo courtesy Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning

by
NJJN Staff Writer
06.28.07

Facing a budget shortfall, MetroWest's central entity for Jewish education said it reached a "painful" decision to discontinue its programs for special needs children and adults.

The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life will seek to transfer some of those services to other agencies, while the future of others is still being discussed.

Partnership leaders described the move as a decision to focus on its "core mission" to serve perhaps thousands of teens and preteens through its educational efforts. Its Center for Special Education served fewer than 30 families, officials said.

Meeting June 18 on the Aidekman campus in Whippany, the Partnership board voted to approve a budget that, as of July 1, will not include the Center for Special Education, its programs, or its staff, with the exception of the few items supported by grants.

Members of the Partnership's own Special Education Advisory Board, which includes parents of children in the programs, objected to the decision. But Partnership officials said the cuts represented a difficult decision in the face of budget realities and the need to have the widest possible impact on the Jewish community.

"It's painful for all of us to make a decision like this," said the Partnership's president, Ellen Goldner, in a joint interview with executive director Robert Lichtman. "You should know that the board came to a unanimous decision, and there are people on the board who have special needs children. We were not blase about this at all."

Motivating the center's closing is a $34,000 cut in the Partnership's allocation from United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, the fund-raising umbrella that chartered the Partnership last July.

Combined with increasing fixed costs, that cut represents a decreased budget of seven percent for 2007-08, the Partnership's leaders explained.

The decision means that the Partnership will end its Sunday morning Yaldeinu Jewish education program, which in the school year just ending served 12 children with special needs. Their range of disabilities has included attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, autism, mental retardation, and other learning and behavioral disabilities.

It will also end the Sylvan Kohn Torah Workshop for 10 older people who range in age from post-teens to 30s and 40s. Many live in UJC MetroWest-funded group homes such as Jespy House or the facilities of the Jewish Service for the Developmentally Disabled.

A workshop and support group for parents of special needs youngsters will be transferred to the Jewish Family Service of MetroWest.

"The JFS happily took it," Goldner said. "It goes with their mandate."

A Sister Schools program that pairs special needs children with "typical" peers will also be discontinued, but a "shadow program" linking Yaldeinu students with teenage volunteers will continue to operate through a grant from the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

"We are working with early childhood programs at synagogue Hebrew schools to take on this program next year,” Goldner explained. Nearly all the programs are on hiatus for the summer.

The Partnership's board also allocated approximately $5,000 to fund the planning and/or transition of the various services over the next several months.

"Our core mission is to be inclusive of all young people, including people with special needs," said Lichtman. Unfortunately, we aren't in a position to continue maintaining a separate department for special needs services. However, we continue to reach out to families facing many types of barriers to engage Jewishly; we are starting a pilot program with JFS to involve teenagers who are asocial [have trouble getting along with peers] and we are including those with special needs.”

Lichtman and Goldner said that in closing the Center for Special Education, the agency had opted to eliminate one of its departments entirely, rather than surgically trim allocations across the board.

“Because that's just nibbling around the edges and not following through on the mandate UJC gave us,” Goldner told NJJN. "We have camp programs, new teen programs, a new vision for our Hebrew high school. That's our core mission. Cutting anything from our core mission would have left us not moving forward at all."

The move eliminates the position held by Wendy Dratler, director of the Center for Special Education, since 1989, when it was part of the Jewish Education Association of MetroWest, the Partnership's predecessor agency.

"I am saddened by the closing of the center," she said. "I do believe that special needs children should have the benefit of learning and participating in Jewish educational programs within an educational institution. It is unfortunate that whenever the needs of special children compete with those of typical children, it is the former who are usually deprived. This important program, which took so long to build, is a major loss for the community.

"A done deal"

Members of the Special Education Advisory Board were disappointed in the decision and worry that other agencies lack the specific mandate for education in serving a special needs population.

"We had no choice. It was basically a done deal," said Joel Reiser of West Caldwell, cochair of the center's advisory board. "We have not only lost our professional staff but our services for children who are in desperate need of help."

Reiser, a former director of special education programs for public schools in the Washington Heights-Inwood section of Manhattan, now teaches special education at the College of St. Elizabeth in Morristown.

"Of course the elimination of the special-ed programs will affect the Partnership's most vulnerable clients. It is foolish to think otherwise," he wrote in an e-mail to NJ Jewish News. "Yes, parents of special needs children, already feeling alienated from the mainstream of Jewish communal life, will certainly feel even more disenfranchised without these programs. The only real way to "advance the mission" is to remember that special needs children and their families are definitely an important, vital, and integral part of the MetroWest community, and their needs, as everyone else's, must be met."

"If I was on the Partnership board, I would have been vehemently against the cuts," said Lori Solomon, who cochairs the advisory board. The North Caldwell resident's 13-year-old daughter, Hannah, attended the Yaldeinu program.

"This was the only opportunity for children with significant special needs to get a Jewish education," Solomon said. "It is my belief that every Jewish child is entitled to a Jewish education. By dissolving this program you have taken away what I believe is their right. I couldn't sleep at night if I had made that decision. The Jewish community should be ashamed of itself for taking away Jewish education from the most challenged of children."

Rabbi Avi Friedman of the Summit Jewish Community Center said his seven-year-old son, Jonah, attended the Yaldeinu program. But, he said, "to my mind, the issue is not Yaldeinu. The issue is there is no federation agency that has as part of its mission special education. I don't have any objection to the Partnership saying it is not going to provide direct services. But it is not providing any resources or consultation. It is wiping its hands of special education altogether."

Two of Collene Stout's daughters, Summer, seven, and Allegra, 17, have been involved in the Yaldeinu program.

Allegra and Summer StoutSummer is a special needs Yaldeinu student. Allegra, a high school senior in Montville, assisted special needs students and is considering a career in special education.

"Where is my child going to get Jewish education now?: Stout asked. "She sings and she talks and she knows her Friday night prayers. She looks forward to this. She is not going to be getting this guided Jewish education. A whole piece of her life is going to be missing. You don't stop your Jewish education at six or seven. If we don't help our disabled, what does that say about where our hearts are?"

Advancing the mission

Lichtman said the Partnership board reached its decision only after weighing the needs of all the populations it is meant to serve, especially its "focused mission" on serving preteens and teens.

The Partnership's programs include teacher training, an on-line teacher learning service, the Central Hebrew High School for area teens, camp programs, and outreach programs for teens and preteens.

"Our mandate was to provide educational experiences for our young people in our community," said Lichtman. "It is really not clear where the agenda of Jewish special education is supposed to fit. You may say because it is an education agency it should fit here, but it's really not clear.

The central mandate of the Partnership, Lichtman said, is to get as many people as possible involved in the Jewish educational experience.

"The board tried to imagine the voices of children and their parents sitting around who are alienated from the Jewish community whom we are mandated to reach," he said. "We tried to imagine the voices of teenagers who are alienated from Jewish life that we are mandated to reach. We had to consider what this agency is charged to do, and we had to make a very difficult decision — to say, "How do we advance the mission we were created to do?"