This Week
A Ladder For Learning
The Jewish Academy of Metropolitan Detroit, the area's newest Jewish
day high school, will open its doors Monday after four years of planning by
determined parents, professionals and community leaders.
No Longer A Dream
DIANA LIEBERMAN
Staff Writer
T
hey are lawyers, doctors, business owners,
rabbis, educators, accountants and entrepre-
neurs.
Regardless of their chosen professions,
they have spent the past four years immersed in a time-
consuming second job — building a Jewish day high
school where none existed before.
Founders of the Jewish Academy of Metropolitan
Detroit, which will open Monday, Aug. 28, at the D.
Dan and Betty Kahn Building of the Jewish
Community Center in West Bloomfield, have many
reasons for celebration.
The school's opening enrollment of
about 50 ninth- and 10th-grade students
may very well exceed that of any other
unaffiliated Jewish day high school in the
United States. Students may enroll right up
to opening day. The nearest competition to
Detroit comes from the New Jewish High
School of Greater Boston, in Waltham,
Mass. That community high school opened in 1996
with 48 students.
The JAMD also has received unprecedented finan-
cial support from the Jewish Federation of
Metropolitan Detroit, which, combined with other
national and local benefactors, has enabled it to lay the
kind of thorough groundwork needed for a successful
school. (See related story on finances.)
Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, headmaster of the
Massachusetts school, said the Boston-area federation
had provided "nowhere near" the support of the
Detroit Federation.
"I've gone across the country using Detroit as an
example of what the community and federation can do
to support day school education," he said.
The JAMD is not the Detroit area's first Jewish day
high school. However, unlike the others, which range
from modern Orthodox to Lubavitch in affiliation, the
new school is the first in Michigan to be non-affiliated
with any stream of Judaism. -
"We have a good cross-section of the different
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denominations," said Steven Schanes of West
Bloomfield, a member of the JAMD's original steering
committee and vice president of the school's newly
formed board of directors.
"We have a community of about 100,000 Jews,"
Schanes said. "It's a shame we have had no non-
Orthodox option for high school up until this time."
THE FIRST STEPS
The initial steering committee was made up of parents
of children at Hillel Day School of Metropolitan
Detroit, a Solomon Schechter day school in
Farmington Hills. It serves students in nursery through
eighth grade. Schechter schools are affiliated
with the Conservative movement.
As the dream of a high school neared
reality, enthusiasm kept building, Schanes
said. Other community members, not affili-
ated with Hillel, contributed their time and
expertise toward pushing the project over
the finish line.
"There was never a time we felt it would-
n't happen," said Schanes, whose daughter, Lauren, a
Hillel graduate, will enter the JAMD as a member of
the school's first ninth-grade class. "But it has surpassed
our highest expectations as far as the number of stu-
dents and the quality of teachers and administrators."
For the coming year, best estimates show about 65-
75 percent of the JAMID's inaugural students will be
Hillel graduates. About 35.will be ninth-graders, with
15 in the 10th grade. Roughly 90 percent of the stu-
dents said they would have gone to public school if this
option had not existed, said Rabbi Lee Buckman, head
of the school.
Jeffrey Garden of West Bloomfield, chair of the ini-
tial steering committee since 1996, said he is convinced
that, once the school's reputation grows, it will become
a primary choice for Jewish eighth-graders.
"Many studies in the late 1980s and 1990s show the
teen years are crucial in setting up later patterns, thus
determining how [the teens] will live their lives,"
Garden said. "The schools that are out there are look-
ing for some way to teach morals and ethics without
offending any group of individuals. We are in a unique
position as a Jewish school to do that."
The JAMD is one of a rapidly growing number of
Jewish high schools in the United States that accept
students of any Jewish denomination.
"Before the 1990s, there were only three that stand
out — Hyman Brand in Kansas City, Charles E. Smith
in Washington, D.C., and Akiba Hebrew Academy in
Philadelphia," said Dr. Leora Isaacs of the New York-
based Jewish Education Service of North America
(JESNA). "If all the schools that are planning to open
actually do open, we will have witnessed at least 10
new high schools over the past five years."
BUILDING THE SCHOOL
Robert Roth of Farmington Hills, who recently took
over as president of the JAMD board, said the hiring of
Rabbi Buckman as head of- school in April 1999 was
"the key point in going from the concept stage to the
development stage.
"Then we could go into marketing, hiring teachers
and finding a space," Roth said. "There have been a lo
of pieces that have come together, thanks to the work
of a lot of people."
Garden said one of the committee's first tasks was
commissioning a feasibility study. Soon after, he con-
sulted with Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, whose Boston-
based New Jewish High School was just about to open
"It was Sukkot, and I sat in Rabbi Lehmann's sukka ,
and asked for his advice," Garden said. "He said, 'Just
go ahead and build it.'
"So I came back to Detroit and told the steering
committee, 'Whatever the study says, go ahead and
build it."'
For the first year, the JAMD will operate inside the
JCC. Four classrooms have been built within existing
walls of the former Rooms 150 and 107 on the
Center's lower level as well as a conference room, stor-
age rooms, large teacher/faculty workroom and lounge
and state-of-the-art science lab.
In addition, students will use other public areas,
such as art, dance and physical education facilities, on
scheduled basis.