Shindy,
Your story of your childhood experience gives me a pang of pain and rage at the same time.
I was also subject to similar public humiliation tactics as a result of my parents financial stresses.
Yes. It is a problem. And we need to ask some painful questions:
1) Is such beahavior tolerable from an alleged mosod of Torah?
2) Have the pricinpals and admininstartors who try to combat tuiotion delenquincy by taking it out on the kids, asked a sheiloh of legitimate poskim before doing so?
Yes I understand that our yeshivos have a mammoth finiacial burden to deal with, but they are yeshivos, not utility companies.
What kind of Hashpaah do you think you have on a child when he is told that his holy status as one of klal yisrael’s “tinokos shel bais raban” is being temporarily supended becasue his parents are behind in their tuition.
I’ll tell you what kind of hashpaah it has. It is an episode of intensely painful embarrasment that stays with you even after you are a “reasonably” well-adjusted adult with a family and children of your own. It leaves you davening that your children will hopefully make it through the chinuch system without being subjected to the kind of nonsense that you were subjected to.
With that said, I will say, that IMHO, our yeshivos, teachers, and rebbeim, are by and large much more sensitive and caring than some of the disfunctional psychos who roamed the classrooms a generation ago.
May we all be matzlilach with our children.