Changing Day School Culture

There's no such thing as old news for us, and we want to share a wonderful article from an October issue of New Jersey Jewish News that highlights the amazing work that the community has undertaken to raise endowment funds for the three MetroWest Jewish day schools. The article really expresses what our Head of School Moshe Vaknin calls avodat kodesh -- holy work. The cooperative efforts of the three MetroWest schools is something for which we all should be proud!

Heads of all three participating schools are also raving about their experiences with the project. They say having a communal pot of money to use to bring experts in to all three schools enables them to solve common problems at a lower cost. They also like having colleagues to turn to in what is often a lonely job. 

The leaders of the three schools meet every six weeks and said any initial anxiety they may have had about working together dissipated early. 

“We have put away our differences — we don’t discuss prayer or philosophy,” said Moshe Vaknin, head of school at the Nathan Bohrer-Abraham Kaufman Hebrew Academy of Morris County, a nondenominational community day school in Randolph. “We can see what our synergies are, what commonalities can enhance all of us. There are so many things we don’t compete over, and this is an opportunity to find ways to collaborate.”