Lakewood vaad solution
The Lakewood Jewish community is not monolithic. It is filled with many different, well meaning groups that have its own unique agenda:
- The Yeshiva wants to in part: get as much land as possible for, expansion; and to profit from (i.e. the land give away to the yeshiva run Cedarbridge Development Corporation) .
- Boys & Girls Schools want free land (which they got, rightfully and deservedly, being that the parents of parochial schools are not using the tax payer supported Public Schools); and and other amenities like bussing.
- Homeowners want to cut spending and increase town revenue to lower their property tax.
The incumbents might be helping one constituency or another, leaving that group indebted to them. So when the Representatives of the Children Schools, or Govoha, demand a particular endorsement, it is either that endorsement or a fractured vaad.
But whose to speak for the majority of people that care about such issues as property taxes? Their needs are not taking precedence.
There is one solution and that is to let an independent, tied-to-no-one vaad inform and educate the community. Then all can decide for themselves who to pull the lever for.
The community is large enough that their lack of unity at times won't leave them on the sidelines.
Au contraire. It will force an open and result oriented debate.
posted by Yeshiva Orthodoxy
at 7:24 PM
7 Comments:
*Some* schools got land; i.e. the ones with the right political connections. Others had to do without.
Many of these schools are privately owned; why should they receive public funds? A better way to give back to non-public-school taxpayers would be to sell these immensely valuable lands, and use the revenue to pay down township debt, thus lowering taxes.
Giving to yeshivas are a direct compensation for the money going to public schools.
It's krum. It's not the yeshivos who pay for the public schools they don't use, but the hamon am. Did they see their tuition bills lowered after the land was given to the yeshivos? Of course not. Compensation for money going to public schools has to go to the people paying the money, isnt' that obvious?
I'm looking at it as a form of school vouchers.
Moraly you are right, everyone deserves the extra government revenue.
School vouchers are a grant to the parents; this is a grant to the schools. There's a world of difference.
What's going on here is just more of the mosdos seeing to their own interests at the expense of the hamon am whose voting power they are using (and abusing).
If the owners of the schools are pocketing the money you are right.
What do you mean "if they're pocketing the money?" The schools belong to them. The tuitions aren't being lowered because of this windfall. It follows that they are pocketing the money.
Anyway, the point is that this doesn't help the parents (aka taxpayers) a ki hu zeh.
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