Debbie Marcus loves learning from her kids. The New Jersey mom grew up in an active Jewish household, but is thrilled to see her children come home and share the insights, holiday knowledge and Jewish culture they study in class. Her daughter, Eliana, is going into second grade at Olam Academy, a budding day school operated out of the Chabad Jewish Center in Basking Ridge.
The center, which serves as the headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch of Somerset, Hunterdon and Union Counties, operates the academy as an extension of its 10-year-old Zimmer Preschool, where Marcus’ older son Zachary also attended.
“I feel at Zimmer and Olam they really give the child a sense of their purpose of being, and that they do have a reason to exist and a way that they will be able to make the world a better place,” she says. “That’s a lot for a kindergartener, but it’s true.”
Last year was the first for Olam Academy, which currently goes up to third grade and begins this school year on Sept. 6. Marcus likes its small classes and in-depth learning environment combined with the Jewish foundation the school provides.
“I would love for [Eliana] to learn Hebrew,” she explains, adding that she always looks forward to her daughter using her newfound skills. “That’s something I can’t teach her at home.”
In a community with a top-notch public school system and private schools, parents who send their children to a Jewish day school are obviously committed to a Jewish educational experience. They’re often people like Marcus, who “realized along the way that [I] wanted a Jewish day school.”
Marcus’ younger son is already assuming he’ll go to the school.
“He would be mad at me if not,” she says.
Marcus’ oldest son, who will enter the fifth grade, goes to a public school and attends a Jewish camp, but if Olam Academy offered classes in the higher grades, she’d consider pulling him out, she says. “I think it would be a great experience for any kid.”
Teaching Students
Head of Schools Brenda Harari, who had been consulting for the program and came on board in her current capacity this summer, highlights the school’s focus on relationship-based classrooms.
“Our teachers are teaching students, they’re not just teaching curriculum,” she explains. The school’s small classroom size allows teachers to support and mentor students wherever they are in their individual learning.
As far as inculcating Jewish values is concerned, she continues, students read and write about the weekly Torah portion, they study math problems in the context of the work that went into building the Tabernacle thousands of years ago, and they apply concepts from classic Jewish texts into their own lives.
“It’s very cool, because it makes everything the kids are doing matter to them,” says Harari, a veteran educator with more than 20 years of experience in various consulting, administration and leadership roles. “It connects them to their past and their future. They have a way of understanding who they are and where they are.”
Rachel Rosenthal intends to send her daughter Carly, currently a third-year student at Zimmer Preschool, to Olam for kindergarten in 2013. A teacher herself, she says Zimmer has been a nurturing environment for her daughter.
“It’s not like any other school I’ve ever seen,” she explains. “They address things from a very different perspective, and they treat the children with a respect you don’t see very often.”
She’ll be watching to see how the school develops in terms of its other offerings, from activities outside the building to possibly physical education or music classics, and hopes to see the school become as big and as broad as possible so it can continue to meet her daughter’s needs. She added that she loves the Chabad community and that her family will remain involved as Carly continues to grow toward her Bat Mitzvah.
“I’m hoping Olam will be the school we are able to choose, because Zimmer has been an amazing experience,” she says.
Of the center’s director of education, Malkie Herson, Rosenthal says she appreciates what she has fostered in terms of rich experiences for the children. “We have the same ideas about how kids should be educated. They have to understand learning; it has to make sense to them. It has to matter to them and it has to matter in their world.”
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