How many times have you heard this one? “I have absolutely no homework, Mom.” And then you watched your child plop in front of the television — helpless, clueless to the truth of the matter.
Now parents with children in 20 Jewish day schools around North America will be able to go online to see exactly what is on the homework platter for the evening.
PlanitJewish.com (winner of j.’s Best of the Jewish Bay Area’s best Web site award) recently unveiled its latest addition — an educational component designed for parents, teachers and administrators — ready to start in style this coming school year.
It’s called PlanitJewish for Schools, and it may revolutionize the way parents keep up with the daily happenings at their children’s school — from volunteer opportunities and event sign-ups, to baseball games and religious and secular holidays.
Is this the end of the paper-filled, mass mailing, face-to-face world as we know it? Is this the only way we can keep up with our children’s busy school agendas?
No, says Howard Brown, CEO and president of PlanitJewish. He hopes instead that the service will help parents like him, a self-described “high-tech guy.”
“When my daughter came home from preschool (this past year), her knapsack would be full of stuff that I would never see,” Brown said. “This is productive. This is good. It’s the way of the world, and, if used correctly, it enhances (our communications).”
PlanitJewish, which Brown started in San Mateo (he has since moved to Michigan), is the engine behind such sites as interfaithfamily.org. It connects volunteers, interfaith families and young adults and singles to the appropriate services. With its new component PlanitJewish for Schools, the company is reaching out to yet another Jewish demographic.
The program offers such services as a comprehensive and interactive online academic calendar of school events, classes, programs, fieldtrips, bus schedules, sports schedules, fund-raisers and volunteer opportunities — even what’s on the menu at the cafeteria for the week.
School administrators can use PlanitJewish for Schools to recruit parents to participate in school activities as fund-raisers or drivers in carpools.
Jane-Rachel Schonbrun, director of student life at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, said that Kehillah has been using the new engine for a year. She said that it is a great resource and that its best feature is its online listings whose contents can lure prospective students.
“It’s beneficial (in so many ways),” Schonbrun said. “It’s keeping our school ahead of schools with antiquated systems.”
Brown stressed that this new program is an important asset for schools such as Kehillah.
“There is so much going on (with the program) that they couldn’t do it themselves, or they would just be paying a lot of money to do it,” Brown said. “We’re doing all the work for them and training them how to be the administrators.”
The idea is to connect school communities in the same way that Brown and his PlanitJewish Web site have been connecting Jews to their local Jewish communities, from Boston to the Bay Area to Houston to Ottawa (coming soon). Brown said that when he first moved from Boston to the Bay Area, there was more Jewish affiliation in Boston.
“In San Francisco, you find that we have 20 percent affiliation. On the East Coast, it’s 70 percent; the numbers are completely flipped,” Brown noted. “San Francisco is the home of the underinvolved, under-affiliated.”
Brown and his good friend Steve Kaufman came up with the goal to break this trend in the Bay Area: They decided to connect the Jewish world over the Internet, something that they felt had not been sufficiently tapped into.
Brown said that there are no immediate plans for the nonprofit Web site to ever become a for-profit business, or spread itself thin with any offspring Web sites of the “PlanitChristian.org” kind. Staffed by a mere three people, the company keeps its costs low and produces a great product at a low price for its clients.
“We’re doing it for the Jews,” Brown said.
In order to launch the new educational component of the company, Brown obtained a generous grant from the San Francisco-based Levine-Lent Family Foundation. The foundation will subsidize the cost of the schools’ Web sites for the first year for up to 20 schools. After the first year, PlanitJewish will keep the service at a substantially reduced fee.
Schonbrun said that Kehillah is very happy with the product and its ability to keep parents, teachers and administrators abreast of what is happening at the school. Best of all, people of younger generations thrive off the information highway, so the new PlanitJewish for Schools engine greatly benefits her students, too.
“Take my 23-year-old brother for example,” Brown said. “If it’s not over text message or over the Internet, he’s not going to know what’s going on. And I’m Jewish neutral, don’t care what area you choose to become involved in, we just want you to choose. However you want to go, PlanitJewish is a powerful way to go.”