JCDS plan takes shape.
Forum focuses on philosophy, prayer, tuition.
By Jonathan Rubin jrubin@jfri.org

PROVIDENCE — It’s your son’s 10th birthday, and you want to take his class to a bowling party on a Saturday afternoon. There’s just one thing: there are kids in his class that don’t go bowling on Shabbat. Do you change the party for these kids, or hold it anyway and exclude them?

This challenge is actually one of the benefits of having a multi-denominational Jewish Community Day School (JCDS), said incoming head Dani Steiner. “To think about how to be with someone that is different from you — this is a tool for life,” he said.

Steiner joined Bill McCarthy, principal of JCDS (formerly the Conservative-aligned Alperin Schechter school), in a community meeting March 1 at Temple Emanu-El that had the largest showing yet for a JCDS information session — nearly 170 people. The evening’s discussion laid out some long- and short-term possibilities for the school, including:

Leadership

Steiner plans to strengthen the guidance role of the faculty and the connection between faculty and individual students by providing an advisor, who would be the mentor and supervisor for each grade. Steiner said he’s also considering creating a school counselor position, an arts coordinator and reinvigorating the school’s fundraising abilities. The list of new faculty for the upcoming year will be announced next month.

Curriculum choices

Steiner feels that education involves so much information “that sometimes our primary job is to make choices. We have to teach these kids how to make choices” and “take a more active role” in their education.

He also suggested that the school could offer “electives” that could somewhat alter the traditional “50 / 50 split” of time allocated to Judaic and secular studies. He said that 80 percent of the day would be divided in the traditional fashion, but the remaining 20 percent could be tailored specifically to the needs of the students — lighter on Hebrew language for those with a strong background, or heavier with Torah or Talmud for those with religious interests.
Matthew Salk, of Pawtucket, said he liked this idea because, in the past, “people told me that if I brought my kids to Schechter after kindergarten they’d have a tough time catching up with the Hebrew.”

Religious components

Students at JCDS are given the “enormous opportunity to develop meaning in their lives,” Steiner said. He would like to see the school focused on motivating students to volunteer in a synagogue environment. In addressing the thorny issue of prayer sessions, he said that one option would be to have a single, egalitarian minyan for younger students, and varied worship in middle school.

Community involvement

“I see a school deeply connected to the community,” Steiner said, addressing an issue that has long concerned the Schechter school — that the larger community does not see the day school as a community resource, but as simply a school for “certain types” of Jews. He said he’d like to see JCDS collaborate with synagogue Hebrew schools to create a bigger social network, to have more all-school events like the Zimriyah song festival, and to have a stronger community service component. “We need the learning and the doing,” he said.

Facility needs

The school’s current location at 85 Taft Ave. is not really the best facility for the school, Steiner said. There are two long-term solutions on the table. The first would involve the much- discussed community campus which would house numerous Jewish organizations, including the JCDS, on the site where the Jewish Community Center now stands. (Negotiations with Brown University and the City of Providence for land adjacent to the JCC are ongoing). The other option would involve using some of the ample land at the Siperstein Tamarisk Assisted Living complex in Warwick for a school.
“I like the idea of a community campus,” Steiner said. “[But] where the campus is located — I don’t have an agenda for that.”

There are two options for the time being, until a permanent site is secured. One is to remain at Temple Emanu-El and the other is to rent space elsewhere.

Tuition

There will be a five-percent increase across the board increase in tuition for next year, bringing the average annual cost to $12,477. However, an important goal of the school’s development is to “never to turn away Jewish student from the school because of money.”

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