Yes, I already figured they were important factors even before I posted the OP, but one question that immediately jumps out at me is the issue of insurance. I personally haven’t taken any administration courses yet, but there are people in my classes who have, and who are pursuing site licenses for home-based preschools. They tell me that the insurance rates are astronomical, as any intelligent person would readily imagine. So when a church that doesn’t have a preschool suddenly decides to start one, do their insurance rates skyrocket?
It is really sad to see 15 fact free posts in GQ before somebody nails it. I am sure things vary from program to program, but that is mostly the way things work. I used to attend a church that operated a preschool. That was mostly the way it was. I was on the church governing board and in charge of the building and grounds. The preschool director had a masters degree in early childhood education. She wasn’t shy about demanding the church pay for any physical improvements to the building. The church budget included a subsidy in addition all the free use of the building. Many church members also made generous contributions.
I don’t know who certifies preschools, but they enjoyed a high rating. Many parents caring little about Christianity, sent their children there for the quality of the program. Also many children whose parents had no way to send their children to preschool, attended for free.
If you don’t wish to take advantage of the generosity of Christians, quietly send your children else where.
If a standalone church were to start a preschool it would most likely be an issue.
However many, many churches have had primary schools for ages, even before single parent families or working mothers became common.
The primary schools were founded when there was no great need for preschool and they already had insurance policies that covered them to be the primary care givers to 400+ children Mon-Fri from 8:00am-3:00pm.
If you’ve been taking on this insurance policy for 40 or 50 years and you approach your insurer and say “We want to add 2 more classes, say 40 more kids and they’ll be a few years younger” I’m betting it’s not a significant increase in what you’re already paying.
I can’t answer that directly, but it is going to vary. As** zoid **points out, the size of the church, the extent of their activities, their current level of insurance, their assets, and the financial liability of governing members such as a board will be factors. In most cases it would be an incremental addition to their existing policy.
More anecdata here, but at where I lived when we had a kid that age, the church “preschools” were really just daycares where old biddies and anyone else from the church who didn’t have anything to do during the day drank tea and gossiped and let the kids pretty much run wild. In addition to not paying for a building/insurance, I don’t think they were really paying the people either. The non-religiously affiliated places presenting themselves as pre-schools actually had people with some sort of educational background and made at least some attempt to teach the kids something.
Not that I’m complaining, since they were incredibly cheap if you just needed someone to watch your kids and there’s certainly worse things for your kids to do than run around having non-structured play time with a bunch of other kids, but I thought presenting it as a “pre-school” was a little disingenuous. I think the Catholic school had an actual honest-to-goodness preschool, but it wasn’t much cheaper than the non-affiliated one.
There are a few related ‘industries’, such as faith based schooling, christian health care cost sharing and charity/low cost work done by churches. All seem to be lower cost services.
I don’t believe it is a attempt to indoctrinate by being the lowest cost alternative and getting the greatest number of people to indoctrinate. But more a different mindset on the value of money and for many a desire to help (misguided or not) so part of what they are doing is ‘charity work’ in accepting a lower rate of pay then they could get elsewhere. Also there is a feeling that one is being ‘called’ to that work (again misguided or not) that is common in faith, this would seem to tend to increase retention time, decrease salary increases and all in all lower costs.
The school I went to way back when - was run by a religious order, and all but the Grade 1and 2 were taught by Christian Brothers. The downtown land was extremely valuable but owned outright by the church, so no taxes; the monks were paid $2 a week pocket money, plus room and board.
Eventually, they were covered by the separate school board to cover the cost of real educated teachers’ union salaries (good old Candian constitution); when the school was taken private again there was some very ill will, because the teachers who had been there for several decades had to leave as they could not afford the lower pay nor to abandon their pension plan after 20 to 30 years of contributions. And… where I could afford to pay my high school tuition from caddy and newspaper route jobs, currently a child costs $7,000 a year and it’s a prestige school.
The short answer; in some places, standards for teachers are very low - and/or pay rates are so low No school board probably means no union and arbitrary hiring/firing policies to cow the staff. The church may subsidize the operation, as others have pointed out, the church building may include the school, especially if it’s a small endeavour. For Catholic schools, the building may have been around for a century, so no major costs left.
There are no major atheist churches, oddly - so a non-church private school is likely to be a profit business set up for the elite who can afford to pay. Nobody works for low wages or volunteers and donates because they believe in atheism. Plus those who are not church-oriented are looking for a quality education, not simply one that reflects a narrow band of values they hold in common with others who think at the same level of deepness about their world.
A lot of the extras are skipped. A hundred-year-old inner city church grade school probably does not include a track-and-field field, nor any facilities fancier than a music room, maybe an art room, and a classroom full of outdated books called a library. Computers? If they have some benefactors or good fundraising. When our school first converted to separate school board school, they ripped out a wall to double the size of the library, and threw out all the books to be replaced by books printed after 1940.
Of course, my classes were typically 35 to 40 students and in the earlier years, each class was 2 grades - 3 and 4, 4 and 5… It still boggles my mind when I hear teachers say they cannot handle a class of 25, it’s too big. But then, rowdy kids got the strap and losers flunked out; second flunk, they left for the public system. No special needs, special lesson plans, etc. Never underestimate the value of cherry-picking your students.
(Plus, in those days we never told our parents if we got in trouble - we’d get twice the punishment when we got home. Today, public school teachers who say anything negative have to defend that action to a parent who says about their nasty brat “My Johnny would never cheat / swear / hit someone” no matter how strong the evidence; and the teacher gets no backing from weanie principals or pathetic pandering school board aministration…)
I don’t know what the USA DOE reporting requirements are, and what burden that places on public schools - but bureacracy is never cheap, and to escape it is always convenient.
I’d guess that’s your answer.
Nowhere near as much as for a home-based business. A church is already a public building accesible to people of all ages; a home is not.
I recently tried to find out when was the earliest public (as in government-run) school in my home town in Spain started. It turned out to be impossible, because their own information has the gall to claim as their “starting date” the starting date of a school which was open to all students including kids who were in town for only a few days (the scandalous thing back then was that it was co-ed; there were already two boys’ schools and one girls’ schools in town)… a school founded by a jesuit, in a building he’d cajoled from his brother, funded 100% by a non-profit whose seed funds had been provided partly by the SI and partly by his own half of the inheritance. I’m reasonably sure the good father wasn’t trying to indoctrinate anybody, since the area already was 100% Catholic: he wanted to make sure that everybody had access to education.
There’s also the kamikaze defence - sue me and you will get nothing, so why bother with insurance if it’s going to double the cost of operations? If the preschool nonprofit organization “rents” space from the church but fails to get insurance, what are you going to sue for?
???
Do you think this actually happens? No church I know of would let an uninsured daycare operate on thier property. Property owners are liability for what happens on thier property, especially if they knowingly let it be used for dangerous purposes.
I’d love to see you provide a cite for a single instance you described.
They do often pay lower saleries, also. But yes, in general the over head is smaller, thus they can charge less. So, several posts had facts before #15. Eva Luna was correct, even if she didn’t have the whole story.
I know I used to have peripheral involvement with a non-profit group that ran a ski hill. They had no insurance for personal injury, simply because that would probably be more than all their operating expenses combined. The land was leased from the crown, their assets were minimal, and whoever sued them would have the reputation of closing down the local ski hill…
Plus in Canada contingency lawsuits are much less common, and lawsuits tended to not win massive awards - simply your actual out-of-pocket expenses, and with no medical bills since thanks to government universal health care, those would normally be not much.
So to what extent is a landlord responsible for the actions of a tenant? That does not sound right. If ACME Enterprises sells its giant building to a holding company and then leases it back (a common accounting trick nowadays) the holding company is jointly liable for every slip and fall? (WTC leases their twin towers back from a real estate investor, he’s liable for every slip and fall too?) IANAL, but I would imagine unless the action was in some way contributed to by the owner, only the tenant would be liable? (I.e. whose fault if the stairs are unsafe? If the kid chokes in daycare? If the building burns down? )
If the landowner knowingly allows a dangerous situation to exist on thier property they can be help responsible. If I lease my land to you knowing your going to do someything dangerously stupid, say operate a substandard daycare where children will put at risk of harm, then I am also liable.
And although it’s not my area of law, it would seem realtively easy to pierce to corporate veil involved in the holding company trick, and sue the actual owners involved, wouldn’t it?
Another factor in to the answer of the question in the OP is: preschools in private schools are often feeders into tuition based kindergarten. So they don’t charge much for preschool, knowing that a good percentage of the parents will be impressed, like the school (or be too lazy to find another) and pay a much larger tuition bill for kindergarten through 12th grade.
We sent our daughter to a Catholic preschool, and the decision was made mostly because of the personal interview with the teacher and the principal. Of the three dozen preschools I checked out, they were the best educated, most articulate, appeared to be the most compassionate and had concrete answers to my questions ready. (The worst was the “Montessori” school near Ridge and Pratt that couldn’t tell me even a single Montessori concept, but pointed to some dusty Montessori marketed toys in one corner. The teacher during the class my daughter and I sat in on screamed repeatedly at one boy who had the wiggles and struck the blackboard with a stick to get the kids’ attention. I figured if this was them at their best behavior for a visiting parent, things must be positively abusive when there are no visitors!)
Before signing anything, I made it clear that we weren’t Catholic, we weren’t going to become Catholic, and in fact we were out and proud pagans, and if this was a problem, they’d better let me know now. They assured me it wasn’t, but that she would be expected to sit quietly at Mass on Wednesdays with her classmates, and write/draw in her “Prayer Journal”, which was essentially an exercise to get them journaling daily, but had nothing to do with prayer (they let me paw through a stack of 30 of them and read a few at random.) We agreed that this was acceptable, and worked very well together for a year. The teacher even asked me to come in during December to teach the class about our Winter Solstice traditions, right along with the Jewish dad who taught about Hanukkah and the Hindu mom who taught about Diwali.
So while I won’t try to denounce FOAF negative experiences with religious preschools, I will be the voice of dissent with my own experiences. There are good, reasonable accommodating religious schools out there. But they are not easy to find.
Churches pay no property taxes. Commercial property taxes, like those paid by secular schools, are extremely high.
I also image that church schools do not have to advertise much. Their congregation knows about the school, and will tell their friends and family.
It’s generally the case that non-profits of all kinds pay no property tax, so a non-profit secular day care would be on the same footing as a faith-based one.
I’m not an attorney myself so this is all second hand from my Father who had his own firm for many years and specialized in Personal Injury claims; That being said, I’ve head him speak many times of holding land owners responsible for truly negligent behavior in regard to their tenants and sometimes having to do investigation to uncover the responsible parties. It may take some work, but you’ll find them.
It should be pointed out we’re not talking about a situation like me renting you an apartment and you killing your girlfriend while you lived there while I had no way of knowing you were violent; It’s more like you’re running a crack house and I’m turning a blind eye to a situation any reasonable person would know is severely endangering the community because you pay the rent on time.
My (Catholic) private grade school and high school, we had a handful of non-catholic students who were there simply for the quality education I gathered. In our case, they were excused from the occasional mass held in the school chapel, and could sit quietly and do something else when it was time for the catechism lessons. Of course by high school nobody gave a crap about this stuff and it didn’t matter. Apparently a few years after I graduated parents complained and things became muc more regimented - like enforcing the school uniform dress code again, too.
Probably, too, maybe it’s my local bias and small sample size but Catholic education seemed far less intense or doctrinaire than many more fundamentalist church denominations.
Not everything is a bible story. Catholics generally, for example, don’t make a fuss about evolution, dancing, rock music, or similar items unless the local bishop or school administration are a bunch of uptight hardasses… but a school uniform means the students won’t be wearing tee shirts with rude words on them, and the girls won’t be allowed to “dress like floozies”.
(My observation way back when on the shirt and tie debate - if you want a white collar job, you have to learn to wear a white collar…)