Australian Jewish Schools Face High Security Costs Amid Rising Antisemitism Concerns

Paying for armed guards at school would alarm and outrage most Australian parents, but for Jewish families, that's the reality from their child's tender age.

"We have a police presence every day," Emanuel School principal Linda Emms told the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion yesterday.

"I watch some of the students come in and they'll fist-bump the police as they come in … and say hello to them, and it's lovely, but it's really sad that we have to have parents to do this."

The commission heard evidence from schools about how this impacts students and the school's operation in surprising ways.

Mount Scopus Memorial College principal Dan Sztrajt estimated that 10 to 15 per cent of his total work hours go toward security — a huge time impost for a principal running a busy school.

"These conversations are a part of every aspect of our school community," Mr Sztrajt told the commission.

Parents are slugged with security levies each year, which principals say have increased by as much as 250 per cent since the Hamas terror attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023.

The commission heard government funding only covered about 30 per cent of the operational and capital costs of security, with parents paying an annual levy in some cases exceeding $1,000.

Schools are worried the rising cost will push parents away.

"Many of our families are making sacrifices financially to have their children at a Jewish school," Ms Emms said.

"They're there because they believe in a Jewish education. Many are also there because they don't feel comfortable with their children being in other school systems at present."

Tyson Wodak, the president of Bialik College, an independent Jewish school in Melbourne, told of the impact that security had on the students, including on his own two children.

"Internalising, I fear, that that's something that is necessary for them and that they are separate from other parts of the Australian community."

While the Jewish school representatives said they would prefer not to need security, the reality is they do, and they said it was parents as well as the schools themselves that were shelling out.

The Australian Council of Jewish Schools (ACJS) estimated that 18 Jewish schools had collectively spent $58 million on security between 2022 and 2025.

"They [Jewish schools] will use resources that other schools would use for all sorts of other facilities, including education, to fund security."

Mr Rothman told the inquiry that Jewish schools should not be left to meet these security costs and called for greater government funding.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare was not immediately available for comment, but his office pointed to extra security funding grants pledged after the Bondi terror attack.

This year's budget included extra funding to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), which will receive $124 million over three years for enhanced security, including at schools.

Pledge for a system free of discrimination

The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration signed by all education ministers in 2019 set out the principles that would guide education systems to deliver for young people.

It included a pledge to provide "all young Australians with access to high-quality education that is inclusive and free from any form of discrimination".

It would seem a failure of those high-minded goals to accept a status quo where a single group of students face armed guards simply because of who they are.

Linda Emms told the commission that colleagues from other independent schools were left shocked by security when she hosted them.

"If non-Jewish independent schools in Australia had to have the fences, walls and guards that Jewish students do, I would have no doubt the Australian community would be in uproar," she said.