Guest Post: “Have” and “Have Not” budget hurts LDS Seminary students

by Jenny Smith

It’s the LDS seminary program’s shameful truth:

Seminary is underfunded, CES knows it, and it’s seminary students who are affected most.

Seminary remains the only youth program where the latest churchwide increase in youth budgets was not applied, perpetuating the old system of “haves” and “have nots”. CES — ever focused on its coddled Release Time Zone students and neglectful of the dedicated Outer Stake student — has set the current budget amount at $4.50/student per year. Seminary is taught approximately nine months a year in the US, and that amounts to 50 cents per student per month.

You read that right: 50 cents.

The budget problem is so widespread that in a survey I did of self-identifying seminary teachers, I determined family budgets help make up the budget shortfall in 85-95% of surveyed Seminary classes. This means your child’s experience in seminary is at least partially dependent on the disposable income of your child’s seminary teacher’s family. It’s true that there are many reasons for a student’s different experiences in seminary, but when you feel critical of your child’s seminary teacher, have you considered that *budget* could be the explanation for an apparent lack of creativity? A student who is in the class of a teacher who can afford Nerf guns and bacon is going to have a dramatically different experience from the teacher who blew their paltry classroom budget on a printer cartridge.

What’s most frustrating to me is that this system where students attend “have” or “have not” classrooms problem is entirely fixable, but CES and priesthood leadership simply won’t. I could speculate why: temple phrasing causes teachers to think they must pay to keep covenants, seminary is often a coveted calling and nobody wants to rock the boat, stake seminary is primarily taught by women whose unpaid labor is undervalued in favor of the male-dominated CES paid system, leaders who presume (female) stake teachers spend frivolously, or shame that you can’t afford the activities the previous teacher did. Regardless, stake seminary is a weird system of reverse priestcraft, where teachers must pay to play — or pay to pray, depending on one’s perspective.

2% of surveyed teachers reported they were asking for release because it was too expensive to pay for seminary out of family budgets.

 An Informal Report on the Stake Seminary Budget Gap by Jenny Smith, unpublished

I admin a large Facebook Group of LDS seminary teachers, and the budget problem is a frequent cause of consternation and worry. Sadly, 2% of surveyed teachers reported they were asking for release because it was too expensive to pay for seminary out of their family’s budget. These good teachers care about the classroom experiences of their students. Why doesn’t CES?

 

Jenny Smith likes Star Trek, peanut M&Ms, and tomatoes — but not necessarily at the same time.

Photo by THE 5TH: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-donut-179907/