Navigating Transitions: From Day School to Public School
by Rachel Blumenfeld
When I first considered sending my daughter to Albert Einstein, I had the same concern many parents do — would she have enough socialization? Would she have enough friends? How would she do in the transition from small Jewish day school to either larger private school or significantly larger public school? Was I setting her up for future successes, or future failures? As so many parenting decisions do, it felt like a make-or-break decision that, if resolved incorrectly, would negatively impact the rest of her life.
My husband and I went to an informational session for prospective parents, and that’s when Rabbi Winaker, former Head of School, changed my perspective and made me feel absolutely confident in my decision to send my daughter to Einstein. He said that attending a small school actually benefits students when they transition to middle school because “in a larger school, if you have a conflict with someone, you can just avoid them and spend time with other students. In a smaller school, you have to learn how to resolve that conflict, and then you take those skills with you to your middle and high school.”
In fact, he said, “Since students have already developed those complex social skills while at Einstein, they are free to focus on things like academics when they're in middle school, even while their classmates might still be struggling to learn conflict resolution.” As a public school teacher of eight years, I reflected on the interactions I had seen between middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, the situations that they weren’t sure how to navigate, the many times they asked to just sit near someone else instead of talking to a friend who had upset them, and I knew that he was right. I thought about the times students couldn’t do their work because they were too upset about a social situation that felt, to them, like the end of the world, but that could have been resolved with a conversation. I was sold.
Second graders enjoy gardening together
Additionally, at Einstein, students don’t need to figure out how to navigate social situations on their own. We explicitly teach these skills with our Second Step SEL program, which teaches skills such as empathy, emotion management, problem-solving, and how to deal with common challenges like gossip, peer pressure, and test anxiety. We also have a social work intern from Jewish Family Services who regularly meets with our students both in groups and one-on-one to further facilitate the development of those skills.
Furthermore, due to our focus on project-based learning and personalized curriculum, our students leave Einstein confident in who they are. They know how they learn, what their interests are, and what their values are. They know what kind of people they are, and what kind of adults they want to become.
Perhaps more importantly, they also know that they have created a family that will always be there to support them, no matter how separated they may become by time and distance. I graduated from Einstein in 1996, and now, 26 years later, if I needed anything, it is my Einstein family I know that I could rely on - my friends from elementary school, their parents who became my second (and third and fourth) set of parents, my teachers who loved and cared for me as if I was their own child.
So while classes at Einstein may be small, they are, as the saying goes, “small but mighty,” and by providing your child with an Einstein education — one that helps them discover who they are, one that is values-based and individualized — you are setting your child up with the greatest foundation for future success.