New Directors' Institute: Helping Religious Schools' New Directors

by Joanne Palmer

Spring 2006 - One of the most important decisions parents make is where to send their children to school. The Conservative movement offers them two main options - children can go to a day school, or they can go to both a public or secular private school and an afternoon synagogue religious school.

Although it might seem as if the movement stands more firmly behind day than afternoon schools, that is not true, says Serene Victor, United Synagogue's education consultant. In fact, she says, the movement both believes in and strongly promotes excellence in all its educational venues.

"I absolutely believe in the power of the synagogue school, the synagogue, and the community to educate well, and to transform the lives of their students and their families," she says. And the parents whose commitment to a Jewish education leads them to spend hours each week carpooling, participating in family education experiences, and going to shul, are serious Jews, whose commitment should be respected, she adds. Each child is different, with a different learning style and different inherent talents; each family is different, each community is different, and each children's relationship to both family and community vary too, Serene says. Each family's decision, then, will depend on its own specific circumstances.

Many parents decide to send their children to day schools affiliated with the Solomon Schechter Day School Association. Serene's mission is to make afternoon religious schools excel by training and supporting the directors who lead them. That's the purpose of the New Directors' Institute, the program she has run for the last seven years. The program takes up to 30 incoming or still relatively new religious school directors, brings them to Rapaport House, United Synagogue's New York headquarters, for an intensive four-and-a-half-day program during the summer, and then provides them with follow-up services for an entire school year.

The institute is Serene's own brainchild, a logical extension of her experience, training, background, and personality. After a few years as a religious school teacher, she became a director; she spent 19 years holding that title, the last 11 of them at Temple Emunah in Lexington, Massachusetts. "I really lived that life, so I know what it's like," she says. Eventually, though, she decided that it was time for her to give up the job; prodded by the retirement of a friend who had been director of education in one synagogue for 18 years, and who died soon after she retired, Serene decided to explore her interests and her options.

As she looked back on her career, Serene realized that she had been helped early on by people more experienced than she, and that as she became a veteran she was more and more often asked to help newcomers to the field. She saw as well that many of those newcomers were inexperienced and did not understand synagogue culture, and she knew that there was very little available to them in the way of formal professional development. So, from her home in suburban Boston, she began a consulting practice, working with religious school teachers and mentoring new directors of education, including a rabbi who had taken her first pulpit and was responsible for the religious school. That same year, Rabbi Robert Abramson, the director of United Synagogue's department of education, asked her to work for him part time, still from home; the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism's New Directors' Institute was born a year later.

Religious school directors, who are recruited from United Synagogue-affiliated congregations, come from a range of backgrounds, and that range tends to be well represented at the institute. Some are former teachers who have decided to make the leap to administration, and some are cantors and rabbis; some of the rabbis are full-time educators and others take on their shuls' schools as they continue to direct the community's spiritual life. The institute's students have included, among many others, "a sisterhood president, an ex-lawyer, a health-care professional, and retired public school teachers," Serene says. Some have spent years studying texts in both Hebrew and Aramaic and others have very little background in those texts; some have the finely honed political skills they will need to work with parents and lay leaders while others are unsophisticated about the challenges of influencing the synagogue culture. The diverse backgrounds facing Serene and the two other professionals who staff the institute - Rabbi Stuart Seltzer of Baltimore, who is the director of Chzuk Amuno Congregation Education Center, and Wendy Light, United Synagogue's consultant for Framework for Excellence and placement - are significant. Luckily, all three thrive on challenge.

The institute teaches directors on both the theoretical and the practical level, and is organized in firsts - first day of school, first school committee meeting, first teachers meeting, and so on. The goal is to be both realistic and optimistic, to reframe any situation in the best way possible. When she discusses parents, for example, Serene stresses that "they jump through such hoops to get their children to religious school! They leave work early, they figure out carpools, they give up every weekend. They are deeply committed to this endeavor." That commitment must be respected, she says. The curriculum uses Jewish texts to frame the theory. "We want our students to have Jewish metaphors," Serene says.

The other part of the program is the collegiality it creates, she adds; that doesn't happen by accident. Students go to dinner twice in a group and work in small groups, and the staff helps the students to network. By the time the New York part of the program has ended, the students have created a support system for each other.

Once they go home, Serene follows up with a conference call every six weeks; she writes out as full a curriculum for the call as she does for the New York sessions. Each call includes about five or six students and lasts for 90 minutes; Serene makes four to six calls each round. The group reunites in person at the Jewish Educators Association conference in February.

Serene stresses that a synagogue school education, overseen by parents who live Jewishly, bring their children to shul regularly, and perhaps send them to Camp Ramah over the summer, can produce deeply committed Jews. Moreover, she said, a congregational education, done right, plunges a child deep into the life of his or her Jewish community. "Wendy, Stuart and I all have committed our careers to synagogue education, and all of us have lived it," Serene says. "We believe in it."

For information about the 2007 New Directors' Institute, set for Monday, June 23, through Friday, June 27, or t learn about Educators on Move, set for July 30 through July 31, call Serene Victor at 617 964-6844 or email her at victor@uscj.org.

• Read more about the plans for this year's program
• Read about last year's institute