Worm-filled food, ex-cons: What is the state of Jerusalem's after-school programs?

The first weeks of the school year in Jerusalem were marred by a crisis surrounding the tzaharonim (after-school programs) in the city’s elementary schools, kindergartens, and nurseries.

This incident saw chaperones quit en masse over a number of disputes surrounding payment, which forced these schools to end early and not provide lunch for the children. Parents were outraged at how the situation was being handled, with many forced to leave work early to go pick up their kids and feed them, all the while struggling to hear anything from the municipality and the new organization in charge of handling the tzaharonim, Amutat Lavy.

As explained in a previous article (“Afterschool nightmares,” September 13), the tzaharon is the last two hours of the school day in public schools – specifically daycares, kindergartens, and the lower grades of elementary school. Teachers have left, and the chaperones come to watch over the children and give them lunch.

Chaperones are the only source of afternoon supervision for children in daycare and kindergarten; the school day would be much shorter without them. Children in kindergartens finish school at 2 p.m., which is when the ganenet (preschool teacher) leaves. However, the kids remain in school for two hours longer, not with a teacher or daycare worker.

Without the chaperones, parents would have to pick up their children from school hours earlier, which would disrupt their workday.

Untrained office workers were apparently being sent instead of proper chaperones to supervise children while others were left in the dust, and no one was sure if their child would have an after-school program on any given day. Parents were furious, and a class action lawsuit was brewing.

THREE WEEKS later, the situation has changed. On Sunday, September 22, for the first time this school year, there didn’t seem to be any issues – with staffing, at least.

So what are parents feeling now?

Overall, while they are still furious about how this situation is being handled, they have been seeing improvements.

Deputy Mayor Hagit Moshe is the head of Amutat Lavy, Jerusalem, which took over the tzaharonim issue from the municipality – and some thought that the organization was making the problem even worse. Parents had spoken to her in a Zoom call on September 16 to voice their complaints about the situation. At the time, they expressed frustration with the deputy mayor and her responses, telling news outlet Kol Ha’ir that it seemed she didn’t have many answers to the questions being asked.

In particular, according to the Hebrew weekly published in Jerusalem, Moshe seemed to try to shift the blame, whether onto the chaperones themselves or onto the Koah LaOvdim (“power to the workers”), the labor union representing Jerusalem’s tzaharon chaperones. Many of them quit rather than work during the school year because of reported changes to their pay structure, altering salaries and eliminating seniority rights that were previously agreed upon.

Amutat Lavy worked to address the cause of this entire situation, however, announcing that the wages and seniority in previously established agreements with chaperones would be kept in place and not rescinded as previously reported. Efforts are also underway to recruit more staff to relieve existing shortages and better serve all schools.

Outrageous issues

Nevertheless, the situation thus far was worse than previously believed.

Maor Mizrachi is a parent who, along with his wife, Alona, and fellow parent Moshe Ravid, leads a group of parents who helped spearhead the fight against Amutat Lavy due to the situation. He explained just how understaffed the tzaharonim were.

“We met with [Jerusalem Mayor] Moshe Lion and Hagit Moshe,” he said. “They told us that 400 out of the 900 chaperones didn’t come to work.”

That left a major staffing shortage, and as they attempted to plug up that huge gap with office workers if necessary, it meant it was never guaranteed that there would be an after-school program at all.

“Often, parents would receive a message at 1:30 p.m. that there isn’t any tzaharon and they had to come pick up their children,” Mizrachi explained.

In addition, some of those temporary workers who came to fill in the chaperone gap raised concerned eyebrows among parents. While previous reports indicated that some of them were employees from the accounting department who didn’t know how to deal with children in emergency scenarios – and some who didn’t even speak Hebrew – parents have now revealed that in at least one case, one of the people sent by Amutat Lavy to help out with a tzaharon was a convicted criminal.

The outrage of parents was further exacerbated by claims that children would be left in soiled diapers or clothes filled with urine and feces for hours, sometimes needing to try to change themselves.

That unqualified workers were sent may seem surprising, as there should be measures in place to ensure that educational workers are properly vetted. Already in Israel, men who want to become teachers need to pass police background checks. However, according to Jerusalem City Council member Laura Wharton, the state doesn’t actually have a lot of knowledge about what goes on in schools.

 “I think at this point, since there were so many problems, they were really becoming desperate for people, and they’re getting people who are not sufficiently qualified,” she told In Jerusalem, citing a 2020 State Comptroller Report on education in the country.

“The Education Ministry doesn’t even know who’s teaching,” she said. “If it’s true for the teachers in schools, one can assume it is true for the other educational employees” – such as these chaperones. “The irresponsibility of the Education Ministry and its lack of supervision is an outrage. I don’t think there is another government in the world that is so totally negligent of its children and their education.”

Food fracas

But how is the Education Ministry even involved with the tzaharonim? After all, while Jerusalem’s after-school programs used to be run by the municipality, now it’s been outsourced to Amutat Lavy. So how much involvement does the ministry even have anymore?

It is involved in a few ways, it turns out, but the most relevant issue related to the current crisis is regarding the food.

Kindergartens don’t give children lunch – only the tzaharonim do. So, no after-school program means no lunch. As Amutat Lavy scrambled to fix the gaps, numerous issues soon cropped up surrounding the food being served.

Ravid showed In Jerusalem pictures of some of the food being served, specifically rice and French fries with worms in them.

Reports have also highlighted the issue of food regarding food allergies, with no accommodations being made for children who have them. However, parents have now shed light on just how bad the food situation was.

According to Mizrachi, this could put children in life-threatening danger, especially given that not all the temporary tzaharon staff have been trained in using EpiPens to relieve sudden and possibly severe allergic reactions.

“There were two cases in two different kindergartens where a disaster was only averted by a miracle, and an incident the previous week where tehina was brought in despite there being children there allergic to sesame, and the chaperones aren’t aware of any of this,” a joint statement by Ravid and the Mizrachis asserted.

“The food is a disgrace. Parents report to us every day that their children have diarrhea and stomachaches. There are also reports of salmonella and dysentery,” they said.

“Worms found in the food, food that is burnt, food with bones in it, spoiled fruit, and hot food being poured into plastic boxes that melt. Where is the concern about the health of our children!?”

But it is unclear if Amutat Lavy has anything to do with the food. According to City Council member Adir Schwartz, responsibility for the food lies with the Education Ministry.

Wharton also placed the blame on the government and the municipality for this issue, accusing them of not valuing education enough.

“Politics is all a question of priorities, and I think these things should be almost a number-one priority,” she said. “It’s definitely not getting the support, interest, and budget that it should be getting. Compared to other countries, Israel spends outrageously little on its education system.”

Promising progress

While the food remains a major problem– as does the hiring of new staff, with some kindergartens not yet having a suitable one – the changes parents have seen so far do seem promising.

In another joint statement by Ravid and the Mizrachis, the three parents noted that major progress had been made, though the work is not yet done.

“This band-aid method isn’t finished yet. There are some problems, and there are kindergartens without permanent staff, but we hope and believe that the improved working conditions and benefits will bring in good chaperones on a regular basis,” the statement said.

“We woke up this year and saw all the rot that we will continue to have for years in the education system,” they said, noting that they are in this fight for the long haul.

“We feel that all of this [crisis correction] could have already happened before the school year started and the tzaharonim could have gone as they normally do,” Mizrachi lamented. “But that didn’t happen, and we have no choice but to look forward to how we can continue to change and improve them.”

The need to use this experience to spark change in the existing system is one everyone seems to agree upon.

“There is no denying that the year didn’t start the way we expected it to,” Schwartz said. “We as Jerusalemites expected normal service, but the merger into Amutat Lavy wasn’t done smoothly. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation. We all worked together on this to make sure the issues were being fixed. We see it progressing from day to day. And the level of satisfaction of the parents is getting better and better.”

THE ACTIVIST parent said that it was time to see where things went wrong and learn from those mistakes, and then to plan for the long term. However, he sees the value of the tzaharonim not as just a place to watch kids but as a chance for further education.

“The first stage is to fix the problems now, and we’re almost finished with that,” Schwartz said. “The second stage is to actually learn from what happened so we can be better in the future. The third stage is to implement what we learned and see how we can change our priorities. We need to see this as an educational opportunity and not only as babysitting.”

Wharton suggested an alternative: not needing tzaharonim at all.

Tzaharonim exist because of short school days. Even though the Knesset passed the Long School Days Law in 1997, which should have extended school days to eight hours, it was never extended to the younger grades. When the teachers or kindergarten staff leave at 1:30 or 2 p.m., the children would be required to leave as well. In order to let parents keep working and not leave full-time jobs to pick up kids, cities developed these after-school programs.

But if longer school days were implemented, then none of this would be necessary.

“The tzaharonim are usually held in the building where the kindergartens are. They just stay on, and the staff changes,” Wharton explained. “Ideally, they would have qualified staff that’s there all the time. It wouldn’t be a separate system but part of the same one.”

Deputy Mayor Hagit Moshe and Koah LaOvdim did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

However, an Amutat Lavy employee, who requested to remain anonymous, told In Jerusalem a different story.

“I know Moshe Lion is being told that the tzaharonim have opened, when they haven’t,” she said.

“And Orit Dolev, head of the pedagogy wing, is busy going to openings and events... and planning a huge concert in Sultan’s Pool instead of taking responsibility.

“I can only imagine what they could have done with all that money to solve the problem instead.” ■

The cost of living or learning?

Another issue that has come up surrounding the tzaharonim is the cost. Parents pay a monthly fee per child for the after-school program. In Jerusalem, it is much less expensive than in other cities in Israel, where the price is a bit over NIS 400 a month per child.

But that price isn’t the same for everyone.

One thing some outraged parents told In Jerusalem was that haredi (ultra-Orthodox) kindergartens have their own tzaharon system, and those cost around NIS 100-NIS 150 per child.

Arabs also pay much less for the programs.

But while some parents are furious about it, the leaders of the parents’ protest movement and others knowledgeable about the situation stress that there is a good reason for it: They pay less, and they get less.

“The haredim don’t get the same kind of programs in the tzaharonim that other kindergartens get,” Laura Wharton said.

“The programs most schools get have different activities, such as painting and dancing. These are all part of the day for them. The haredim, however, get very little. It’s a very minimalist budget,” she said.

“I’m not sure that it’s justified or if it fully accounts for the differences in costs, and I think it’s highly problematic, especially because some subsidies go to families where a father is dodging the IDF draft.”

Another reason Wharton mentioned is that haredim and Arabs are often categorized as lower income demographics, which may also be a factor.