Jewish school opens doors to others
Academy wants ‘more people in community’ to know about it
For four decades, the Jewish Academy of Orlando has educated Jewish students in Central Florida.
Now, for the first time, the day school has decided to admit students who aren’t Jewish.
The school, open to kindergartners through fifth-graders, made the change effective this month, although no non-Jewish students have yet enrolled, Head of School Alan Rusonik said.
Non-Jewish parents had been inquiring about admission, and the school’s members — mostly the parents — voted Nov. 15 to amend the bylaws, he said.
“We have a great school,” Rusonik said. “We just want more people in our community to know about it.”
Jewish day schools vary on their admissions policies, said Paul Bernstein, chief executive officer of Prizmah, an association that works with 350 U.S. day schools.
Orthodox schools in general take only Jewish children, defined as those with a Jewish mother. But more liberal branches of Judaism have policies that vary.
Schools that open their doors
to non-Jews have different reasons, including declining enrollment and wanting to share Jewish learning with the community at large, Bernstein said.
“Families like the spiritual nature of faith-based schools even if it’s not your own faith — particularly if you are one of the monotheistic religions,” he said.
In 2016, the Jewish Academy of Orlando, which has about 75 students, eliminated its middle school and moved from two buildings on the campus to one, said Paul Lefton, spokesman for the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando, in effect the landlord for the school and the Roth Family Jewish Community Center of Greater Orlando.
“It gave us an opportunity to combine and live within our means,” Rusonik said.
The school, where annual tuition ranges from $11,000 to $16,000 depending on the grade of the child, was faced with a challenge when attendance dropped at the preschool after hoax bomb threats were phoned in early last year to Jewish institutions in the U.S., including the Jewish Community Center in Maitland. About 75 percent of the day school’s students come from the preschool, he said.
Preschool enrollment has since picked up and is expected to reach its previous level by next year, said Keith Dvorchik, the center’s executive director. Forty percent of the nearly 300 children aren’t Jewish, he said.
“I think it really speaks to the quality of the school,” he said.
Since the threats, security has been strengthened at the campus, which also houses the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida, although it announced last week that it intends to move to a building in downtown Orlando that is five times as large as its 7,000-square-foot home in Maitland, where it has been since 1986. The preschool entrance is being moved and soon will require students and parents to go in through the center and identify themselves at the security desk.
Last week at the Jewish Academy of Orlando, the students studied Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. The lesson was designed to teach students the importance of treating people with kindness and respect — “kavod” in Hebrew.
The school’s motto is “Go out and change the world” — a Jewish philosophy known in Hebrew as “tikkun olam,” or “repair the world,” Director of Academics Nikki Buyna said.
“It’s not just academics,” she said. “It’s also character.”
Administrators, teachers and parents tout the school’s 1-to-14 teacher-student ratio, Hebrew-language and Judaic-studies curriculum and technology integration among the reasons it may appeal to parents of other religions.
Amanda Jacobson Nappi, co-president of the academy’s board of directors and a lawyer by profession, attended as a child and sends her first- and fourthgrade daughters there, too.
“I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for the community to be able to take advantage of the program and the innovative learning the school has to offer, while at the same time having diversity in the school, which is something we promote as part of our own learning,” she said.