Wexners’Wexn donationdona lets educatorseduc look to future
When RabbiR Tali Zelkowicz stood before the students on their first day of school Thursday, she spoke about something — and someone — she had been hoping to introduce for several months.
She gestured to the teachers around the gymnasium, standing behind the approximately 40 students in grades one through six, and pointed out that they each had a partner or another teacher they worked with.
Zelkowicz, the head of school at the Columbus Jewish Day School in New Albany, didn’t.
“I really wanted a partner,” she told the kids. “I went and looked high and low and all over the country and I found one in Boston, Massachusetts.”
The children clapped as Zelkowicz introduced Rachel Arcus-Goldberg, the school’s new, and first, principal.
Zelkowicz, who came to the school a year ago from Los Angeles, is happy to have Arcus-Goldberg, as Zelkowicz has been doing the duties of both a superintendent and principal. But for the school, Arcus-Goldberg’s arrival signifies more than just a new
principal, it shows that the school is starting to thrive and grow.
Arcus-Goldberg was hired because the school was unable to gain momentum and grow without a principal, Zelkowicz said. Now it has a goal of gaining about 50 percent more students over the next two years, Zelkowicz said.
On Aug. 1, the progressive Jewish school, with about 60 students, got the largest single gift in its history from Leslie H. and Abigail Wexner and The Wexner Foundation. Though the amount has not been revealed, the sizable donation is allowing the school to go from “surviving to thriving,” Zelkowicz said.
The independent school receives donations and grants and is supported in part by tuition, but it also provides a lot of scholarships so students can attend. That makes the Wexners’ contribution a “game-changer,” Zelkowicz said.
The school is in the middle of a marketing campaign and is working to change its information systems from paper to digital.
Zelkowicz also is starting to plan for the future. She already has a few things in mind, including creating a “makerspace,” updating old computers and constructing a naturescape playground for the intermediate students.
Those are the tangible things, but the school also is working on intangible traits it hopes the students will leave with. Those include social responsibility, leadership, self-knowledge and, of course, intellectual knowledge.
“Our kids come out intelligent and intellectual, asking amazing questions and listening,” Arcus-Goldberg said.
The Wexner Foundation has long supported the school, but the recent gift shows a “new level of giving reflecting renewed confidence in the leadership of the school, and to provide the next generation of parents and students the ability to move forward with confidence and excitement,” said Rabbi B. Elka Abrahamson, foundation president, in an email. to keep fundraising. The difference now is we’re not fundraising for our lives, we’re fundraising for the future.”