To retain that sense of community during the critical middle-school years, the Palo Alto school is expanding. It will include a sixth grade in the fall. A seventh grade will be added in 1999, and an eighth grade in the year 2000.
In the fall of 1999, to accommodate the larger number of students, the school will move to a new site on Arastradero Road, adjacent to its present site at the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center. Buses will transport students from outlying areas.
Ayla’s mother, Susan Protter, who helped found the school in 1990, was instrumental in bringing about the expansion. She says a strong Jewish focus is especially important for middle-schoolers.
“In this time when teens are struggling with their identity and society is not guiding them morally, the Torah is there and will be threaded into the curriculum.”
The school’s curriculum is presently two-thirds general education and one-third Judaic, though the two are often interwoven. The Judaic portion includes Torah text, Mishnah (the code of oral laws in the Talmud), midrash (biblical commentary), history, ethics and values, and prayer.
The school’s director, Gerry Elgarten, who came from the East Coast four years ago, says he’s impressed with the level of commitment.
“You get caught up in the energy of this Palo Alto community, the sophistication of the board and the parent body,” he says. “They’re doers. They start their own synagogues, their own schools.”
Public schools, Protter says, do not always meet the needs of families with sixth-graders.
“They’re very big, they’re overcrowded. Parents feel like they lose contact [with their child]. In terms of academics, [parents are] looking for a more individualized style where teachers can really individualize the academics for the child.”
The sixth grade at the Mid-Peninsula school will have around 20 students and two teachers. This team-teaching approach is key to the school’s success, Elgarten says.
“Here you get 1+1 =3, the synergy of two people working together makes for a stronger curriculum.”
The school, Protter says, takes an egalitarian approach. Boys and girls study together.
“Prayer services are inclusive of everyone. The language that we use is non-gender oriented. God is not He. It’s very important that the children know the female heroines of the Bible.”
Students also learn a variety of approaches to Judaism.
“We have an incredible range of families, and how they practice Judaism from Orthodox to secular,” she says. “All perspectives are given. The child is encouraged and taught how to look at things from all different perspectives and then formulate their own ideas and their own opinions.”
With a grant from Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, the school held a conference earlier this spring “to conceptualize the ideal Jewish middle school,” Elgarten says.
The day school plans to help develop its curriculum out of the ideas that emerged from the conference.