School & Youth Report – June 2024
Melissa & Scott Kessler, Co-VPs School & Youth
Another successful school year has come to a conclusion. Once again, our students benefited from a combination of classroom learning, and experiences surrounding our most significant holidays.
This year was Cantor Rockman’s 6th year as our Director of Education, and during the course of the school year, Cantor made the decision that this would be his last year in this role. We are incredibly grateful to Cantor Rockman for taking on this position, and for all that he has done, and continues to do for our Religious School and our synagogue youth.
Ronit Bivas is taking over as our new Director of Education for the upcoming school year. Ronit taught in the CBT Religious School this past year, and she also serves as our PJ Library/Family Engagement Coordinator. Ronit comes to CBT with extensive experience as a teacher and an administrator, in both Jewish & secular education. We are very excited to work with her in the years ahead.
Planning is now underway for the 2024-25 school year, and ads have been posted to fill the open positions we have for teachers. Our budget for 2024-25 was based on an estimate of approximately 30 students enrolled in grades Pre-K through 7. As was reported last year, the majority of students are in our two youngest classes (pre-K through 2nd grade), Shorashim and Anafim. We are committed to meeting the needs of these younger students and their families, while also providing a robust education for our older students as well.
This past year, many of our major holidays fell on the weekend, making it challenging to find available dates for PJ Library events. Despite this, we did have several successful PJ Library events, and again, planning is underway for the year ahead.
Our Youth Advisor, Sydney Sookerman, continues to lead our USY program, which includes USY Chaverim (3rd-5th Grade), USY Gesher (6th-8th Grade) & USY (9th-12th Grade). Although we have fewer USY’ers than in years past, Sydney has worked diligently to keep our youth involved, and to partner with other local USY chapters for events and programming.
Our CBT Chai / Better Together program, which brings together High School students and senior citizens for events and activities, was once again spearheaded by Stacey Rockman.
We would like to thank everyone who contributed to the success of this past year, including (but certainly not limited to): Cantor Rockman; all of our Religious School teachers and assistants; everyone who volunteered at our PJ Library events; our Religious School Parent Committee President Mike Atzbi; our Youth Advisor Sydney Sookerman; our Better Together leader Stacey Rockman; and our Junior Congregation Family Service leader, Barry Safeer. Lastly, we would also like to thank our predecessors, Andrew Goldberger and Doug Smoller for their guidance and assistance, and welcome Mike Atzbi, who will be joining Melissa Kessler as Co-VP of School and Youth, as Scott moves on to be Vice President of Administration.
