dealing with the problem of dropouts in the Haredi school system

The situation of the noshrim has been in the media a lot recently. Noshrim is the term used for dropouts from the Haredi school system. These are teens at risk or if they are not yet in that category, they are approaching it.



The kids drop out of school, they hang out in "town", they hang out in bars, they get with a bad crowd, some end up doing drugs or whatnot and the like. It is a big problem with the numbers of such kids increasing all the time.



The noshrim phenomenon is not limited to kids from broken or dysfunctional families. The whole range of families is affected by it. The very best are on equal footing with the most broken.



A delegation of Haredi askanim, including people who support programs designed for these kids, Members of Knesset from the haredi parties, Haredi journalists, Haredi media and others recently went out on a Saturday night in search of the noshrim to see firsthand how serious the problem actually is.



They spoke with the kids, they held their meetings and have committed to working to find solutions to the problem.



Poeple have always blamed the families of these kids as the source of the problem. The parents do not pay enough attention to the kids. Parents are too busy. etc. The kid feels unloved and goes off to find people who give him/her the attention he desires and finds that love and attention on the streets.



R' Moshe Gafni, MK from the UTJ party, was in the delegation. Before he went out, he discussed it with Rav Shteinman. Rav Shteinman told him to bring his thoughts and ideas to him afterwards.



After they came back from their meetings and discussions about it, R' Gafni went back to Rav Shteinman to tell him what he saw and what he thought about it. He said the source of the problem seems to be the parents who do not give the kids enough attention but choose to rely on the teachers and rebbeim assuming they will give the kids the appropriate amount of attention.

Rav Shteinman, supposedly, replied that the parents are guilty to a certain extent of not giving the proper amount of attention. But, Rav Shteinman said, oftentimes the students have already begun to fail before the parents neglect them. Only later when they are looking for reasons and excuses they might blame the parents. The lack of attention by the parents is often a result of the child's slip into troubled waters. We have to find the source of the problem, and often the parent's not providing enough attention is not the source but a symptom.

Rav Shteinman continued by saying that a large part of the problem is sourced in the situation we have with our school system. The schools all set themselves up to be for the best students of this or that group. One takes the best children only of avreichim, while the other takes the best of bnei torah and the next takes the best of this or that. Everybody is declaring their schools to be only for the best.

The result of this, Rav Shteinman says, is that students who are not necessarily the best are stuck in systems not appropriate for them. When they fail to perform up to the standards and expectations of the school/system, they being to slide down the slope and end up as noshrim.

The schools I went to as a kid were pretty much happy to take in and educate anybody and everybody who was willing to go there. Sure there were a number of schools, each catering to a different worldview/level of religiosity (is that even a real word?) and general outlook, but they all had a range with overlap. One school was not for great kids, the other for mediocre kids, and the third for weak kids. Each school had the full range of kids.

In my neighborhood here in Bet Shemesh, there are something like 15 cheiders, each one declaring itself to be for excellent students. And each one is so full, if they smell even a hint of mediocrity on an applicant, or even a sniff of something not standard, they will not accept the child. There is no range. When you get your kid in, if he does not live up to the very high expectations of the school, he will be deemed a failure. Some of the better, more conscientious schools, will not give up on a child so easily just because he presents a little more of a challenge, but many will.

There is no range of students in the schools in this system. Sink or swim as they call it, and Rav Shteinman hit a very important nail on the head. But nobody wants to say they deal in mediocrity. A school will never want to say they educate children who are mediocre, and parents will not want to send their kids to a school that has the reputation of being mediocre. Everybody wants the best and everybody thinks their kids are the best.

The result will be a problem with kids failing in the system. The only solution is not to open schools for mediocre or weak children, but to open schools that cater to everybody and to stop with the system of everybody opening up his own school that caters to only the best. Just open big schools that are for everybody. The best will rise to the top, the mediocre will find their place within the system and succeed at their level, and the weak will get the help they need to succeed.