Episode Three: Navigating a Path to Day School Sustainability
Charles Dickens' insight that certain moments can be both the best of times and the worst captures the quality not only of revolutionary periods but of much in life. If sugar is the taste of childhood, then the dominant flavor of adult life is surely bitter-sweet. That's an idea one encounters in the shacharit service each morning when the Almighty is blessed not only for creating light but darkness too.
This case study, "Negotiating a path to day school sustainability," is rich with bitter-sweet moments; both light and darkness. It is the last of three connected episodes commissioned for use at the PEJE Assembly of 2010. The data for this case was gathered in the spring of 2010 when the school in view, like many others, was confronting an economic downturn that was well into its second year and eating ever further into the school's financial foundations. What was experienced then as an unanticipated crisis now seems like the "new normal.”
Our illustrated case study does not do justice to the seriousness and thoughtfulness with which the principal characters at the Isaac Herzog Academy approached a host of chronic challenges. But this rendition does encourage the reader to consider the kinds of questions posed by Herzog characters, and to reflect on the ways your school is the same or different. As you read, ask yourself:
- What questions are stakeholders comfortable asking at your school's Board table?
- Who is allowed to ask them?
- What is it that makes a question constructive, rather than harmful?
Another feature that emerges strongly from this case format—something that a visual form communicates well—is the emotional reaction of leaders at times of great challenge. As you read, it's worth asking:
- How does your own leadership contribute to an emotional climate in which people are ready to face down tough times?
There is a sense at the Isaac Herzog Academy that people are ready to challenge themselves, hopefully with their sights set on the horizon. This might be a metaphor for what is needed at the present moment in Jewish day school education in North America.
I can think of no better articulation of what this perspective enables one to see than the words of the British poet, John Keats, in To Homer:
Aye, on the shore of darkness there is light
And precipices show untrodden green,
There is a budding morrow in midnight
There is a triple sight in blindness keen.
BY ALEX POMSON, Melton Centre for Jewish Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
ILLUSTRATIONS BY STEVE SHEINKIN