Gan woes

January 25, 2011 - 10:44 PM by Jessica

Safra Square aka Kikar Safra

The gan registration saga continues. I thought I was ahead of the game this year, asking around for good ganim for three-year-olds in December, gathering information, making some preliminary calls. Granted, the gan I was interested in was already full two years ago, so that wasn’t going to work.

And so, a friend of mine and I headed out one Monday morning, full of vim and vigor and ready to find just the right place for our boys, all of whom will be three for the next preschool year. We knew going in that we’d probably prefer a private preschool with a decent children-teacher ration compared with a public preschool, where there are usually something like 30 kids and two teachers. But we checked out a full selection and instinctively liked one partially-public gan in our neighborhood. Several days later, we’d both paid the NIS 300 registration fee and were ready to register on-line with the municipality, a necessity given the preschool’s partially public status. Not a bad thing, really, because it makes it slightly cheaper.

This was after an initial visit to the ‘gan’ department of City Hall at Safra Square, where we found out that we first needed to get our bank’s permission for automatic monthly payments, and come to the municipality with that stamped piece of paper in hand. Or fax it in.

So I had gone to the bank, faxed in said paper and even received a phone call from some man at the municipality telling me that I should now go on-line and register my boys. Okay, I said. And I did try. But it just did not work. No matter, said my friend. You have to go in person anyway, since we’re trying to sign them up for our Mamlachti gan, and offer a second choice (standard operating procedure) for a gan that’s Mamad (Mamlachti Dati, or public religious school as opposed to just plain old Mamlachti, a secular public school). In other words, the Jerusalem city online system does not recognize the possibility that a person may be interested in both a secular and religious school option, it can only be one or the other.

In I went, waiting on line for over an hour (although it is an opportunity to read the latest New Yorker in its entirety), until I finally got seated at booth #4. When we got to the part in the computer where you give your two choices for pre-schools (does this mean I won’t get my first choice?), I gave the code for my first choice, the non-religious pre-school and then the code for the public religious pre-school. No dice, the computer would not let that happen.

Called my friend in a panic, and she told me that her clerk just wrote it in pen, once the form was printed out and signed. Interesting solution, and one that I’m sure they won’t honor, just because half a dozen southern Jerusalem liberal religious types all want the same secular private gan and religious public gan. “Feh, those Anglos,” they’ll say. “Always looking to mix up the system.”

Maybe. But I’ll be impressed if someone in the system understands what we were trying to do. Then again, I just want my first choice.

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