When ninth-grader Shulamit Izen fought to establish a group uniting gay and straight students at her Boston-area Jewish high school in 2001, the effort seemed remarkable enough to inspire a film. “Hineini,” the 2005 documentary chronicling the young lesbian’s struggle, became a touchstone for a nascent movement encouraging openness and support for teenagers grappling with…
Before sending her 6-year-old son, Charlie, off to day school in September, Brenda Hite wondered if she’d made the right decision. Neither Hite nor her husband, Tom, are Jewish, but the public school options in their hometown of Akron, Ohio, didn’t enthrall them. So they applied to the local Lippman School, which impressed the Hites…
Long considered a crown jewel of the Conservative movement, the Schechter Day School Network is fast contracting — its enrollment dwindling and its schools being closed, consolidated and, increasingly, transformed into nondenominational community day schools. Since the late 1990s, the network has lost about a third of its schools, a handful of which haven’t closed,…
The month of December brought some bad news for Jewish day school advocates. According to the Avi Chai Foundation, which tracks these things, day school enrollment saw a “modest decline” of about 1.4% in the 2011-12 school year, compared with the year before. The sharpest decline was reported among the Solomon Schechter schools of Conservative…
Recently, my local Jewish newspaper published its perennial look at how day school tuition is rising faster than inflation. This year’s article featured our only local co-educational Jewish high school, which I attended years ago and to which, due to rising costs, I was unable to send my own children. The resulting polarization of the…
Thousands of graduates of Jewish day schools will head off to college this September. But unlike graduates of public school, they will begin their higher education with credentials in Hebrew, Tanach and Talmud, along with mathematics, English literature and biology. And many of these students will enter secular colleges, bringing their uniquely Jewish worldviews into…
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