Dear Friends,
I want to take this opportunity to wish you and your family a happy and healthy Fourth of July weekend and give you a brief update on our recent progress at Addlestone. While we are busily preparing our school for reopening with social distance measures in place in the fall, I believe at this time of our country celebrating its Independence Day, we should reflect on the past as well. As we approach celebrating AHA’s 65th year, this past spring we mourned the passing of our founding Rabbi and Head of School, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, OBM. His passing seemed to almost coincide with the global trauma unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Locally, we were not spared from upheaval as well. While the challenges and difficulties we have faced and continue to grapple with were and are significant, I am happy to report that, all of our students have completed the requisite coursework and learning required to matriculate to their next year’s grades with flying colors. Our Independent School Association gave us guidelines for what we would have to do in an online learning environment from March through June and our dedicated staff of professional educators quickly rose to the occasion and exceeded expectations. While of course, you cannot compare a virtual educational environment to an in-person environment, for the most part, our kids were involved in consistent, significant, educational experiences throughout the last quarter of the year. (Please feel free to click here in order to take a peek at our Parent Portal that was set up to help provide educational resources to our families during the pandemic).
We have had to make some of the most difficult decisions I have ever experienced in my educational career. By using our guiding principles of doing the right thing and ensuring the safety of our students, those decisions were made easier. The difficult decision to cancel our school’s Gala in March and to transition to an online learning environment, as well as not opening our summer camp this year were necessary decisions to ensure the safety of our families.
I continue to receive phone calls from people considering relocating to a greener, more spacious, less congested environment and it feels like the acceleration of people in big cities who are looking for “greener pastures” is growing. We already are looking forward to welcoming some new young families who are arriving in Charleston over the summer and welcoming their children to school in the fall. While we will miss those families that are relocating elsewhere, we are able to temper the bittersweet feeling we have by looking forward to a bright future as we begin the next chapter at Addlestone together.
Please let me share with you a hopeful highlight of my week that took place with one of our families and students. Corinne, a young lady in our elementary school, was completing one of her scout awards this summer and needed to have a Rabbinic figure Zoom test her Judaic knowledge as part of the process for receiving her Aleph Religious Emblem Award. I was thrilled to read through her answers to the questions which were not easy and was honored to attest to her high level of knowledge needed to earn her award. When I asked her why she chose to focus on some specific parts of the Torah in her answers, she said: “Well, I simply chose to use the things I remember learning at Addlestone over the last few months because I knew them pretty well.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Elisha Paul
