Four families left my East Bay synagogue community this summer — two moved to Israel and the other two to Chicago. Each move was personal, yet all of them pointed to the same pressures: the high cost of Jewish day school and the overall cost of living in the Bay Area. Taken together, these stories reveal a troubling pattern.
In every case, at least one parent was a senior Jewish communal professional. For these families, sending their children to day school is not a luxury — it’s an extension of their calling, a way of weaving their own families into the robust and vibrant Jewish community they are working to build for everyone else.
Day school tuition has long been a source of concern in North America, and several communities have begun to take a systemic approach to expanding day school accessibility for Jewish professionals as well as the broader community. The Bay Area, where K-8 tuition can range from $26,000 to $46,000, has yet to take this type of approach to affordability, leaving families to navigate the challenge school by school.
A program funded by Crown Family Philanthropies in Chicago limits the cost of day school education to no more than 12% of a family’s adjusted gross income. Similar initiatives exist in places like Boston and Seattle. In Atlanta, an initiative by the Zalik Foundation offers Jewish communal professionals up to 50% off Jewish day school tuition.
In the Bay Area, many Jewish day schools offer families meaningful financial support, and a few have decided to provide significant discounts to Jewish professionals shouldering the costs on their own. Other schools are unable to offer their own faculty and staff discounts, let alone the community of Jewish professionals that might want to send their children to those schools.
We in the Bay have long prided ourselves as being trendsetters in American Jewish life — innovative, values-driven and forward-looking. And, it should be noted, the Bay is innovating to strengthen the ecosystem of Jewish early childhood education with its EarlyJ initiative. In the arena of day school accessibility, however, we are not leading, and we risk losing a lot more.
When senior Jewish professionals can’t afford Jewish life in a particular place, they take their skills and talents to a community where their own Jewishness can thrive, and the community they leave behind suffers. That is what is happening to us, and if we do not stop this trend by investing in day school affordability on a community wide level, our Jewish institutions won’t be able to hire experienced Jewish professionals, programs will close, and new families will stop coming. This may sound like a worst-case scenario, but for those of us watching Jewish professionals leave because they cannot afford Jewish life here, it feels frighteningly possible.
This troubling vision of the future invites us to consider whether our current infrastructure truly supports our communal aspirations. Day schools sit at the center of this question. How we understand their role reveals whether we see them as a private good, or a public necessity.
I am suggesting a paradigm shift in the way we see their role in our community. The dominant approach in advocating for day schools is based on their capacities to strengthen Jewish identity. When we see day schools in this light, we frame their benefit as something primarily personal — good for those particular families who prioritize said identity. This makes Jewish education seem like an optional lifestyle enhancement, valuable for some but not something the entire community is responsible for. Viewing day schools in this light also raises equity questions: Why subsidize one family’s identity-building more than another’s?
Instead, we should understand Jewish day schools as infrastructure, not unlike hospitals, roads or internet access. During the pandemic, we learned who “essential workers” were — not just doctors, but teachers, grocers and delivery drivers. We can apply this thinking to the Jewish community as well.
Jewish professionals at all levels — educators, rabbis, nonprofit leaders — keep the community functioning. They provide care, guidance, Torah and structure. When they can’t afford the basic conditions for Jewish life, they leave. We don’t fund hospitals only for people in surgery, we fund them so they are there when we need them. We can look at day schools similarly. They are part of the infrastructure that allows Jewish communal life to flourish. They are part of the equation.
If we want the San Francisco Bay Area to continue to sustain and innovate a vibrant Jewish life, our community must invest in the infrastructure that enables it, placing affordable Jewish day school education at its center. Those four families did not leave for more affordable housing or better weather; they left for sustainable Jewish lives. Given the philanthropic strength of the Bay Area Jewish community, if we cannot make day schools accessible to those who ensure vibrant Jewish life, it will not just be schools that will shrink, but our collective Jewish future.