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Fresh start at Harkham GAON Academy

The contrast at the Westside Jewish Community Center (WJCC) was marked: In the gymnasium, Harkham GAON Academy students were actively engaged in a basketball game.
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October 5, 2015

The contrast at the Westside Jewish Community Center (WJCC) was marked: In the gymnasium, Harkham GAON Academy students were actively engaged in a basketball game. In the auditorium next door, members of a different generation were performing their own exercises in a WJCC-sponsored senior-citizen workout class. 

This scene, and others like it, began playing out this fall when the coed Modern Orthodox school previously known as Yeshiva High Tech moved into rented space at the WJCC.

The marquee outside the Westside Jewish Community Center welcomes its newest tenant, Harkham GAON Academy. Photo courtesy of Harkham GAON Academy

“We have a new place … new administration — everything is different,” Harkham GAON Academy Principal Debora Parks said in an interview at the WJCC, the school’s new home for the 2015-16 school year. “Yeshiva High Tech doesn’t exist anymore.” 

Yeshiva High Tech originally opened in the fall of 2012, offering blended learning for a group of approximately 40 students in grades 9 through 12; enrollment is now above 50, of which 14 are girls. In blended learning, some instruction and content are received online, under adult supervision, and some instruction occurs in the traditional teacher-in-the-classroom manner.

GAON student Sarah Brown raises her hand during Hebrew class. Photo by Ryan Torok

Rabbi Moises Benzaquen, the school’s founder and director of Judaic studies, included GAON in the new name as a way to honor the three Israeli teenagers who were kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank in 2014: Gilad Shaar, Ay-el Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel. The first letters of the teens’ names along with the addition of the letter “O” forms the word “gaon,” which is the Hebrew word for “genius.” 

Benzaquen visited Israel in the summer of 2014 and was moved by the experience, Parks said, and the new name for the school occurred to him while he was traveling back to the United States. 

The other part of the name celebrates Efrem Harkham, an entrepreneur, philanthropist and longtime supporter of the school who has promised a $100,000 gift at the start of January, Parks said.

“There is a need for another alternative-type high school, a Jewish high school,” said Harkham, founder of L.E. Hotels and president and CEO of Luxe Hotels. “We’ve got the conventional type, which we are very thankful for — YULA, Shalhevet, the other high schools in the area — but we really needed another choice, a more affordable, innovative choice. We needed to find a way of teaching these kids in a more affordable way as well as teaching them in a style that is conducive to the new age.”

Parks was hired as principal this academic year, succeeding Rebecca Coen. Parks — who is not Jewish — previously worked for 13 years at Maimonides Academy in Los Angeles.

Harkham GAON Academy, a coed modern Orthodox school, offers online learning in a traditional classroom environment. Photo courtesy of Harkham GAON Academy

Harkham GAON’s blended learning is for the first time incorporating a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) online curriculum called Edgenuity. Also for the first time, the school is relying on Santa Monica College (SMC) for a Hebrew program that brings in two instructors from the college to teach beginning and advanced Hebrew. Students earn college credit for the Hebrew courses. On a recent school day, students in the beginner’s class — Hebrew 1 — sat in front of laptops while a Hebrew instructor from SMC, joining them in the classroom, led them in instruction. Lessons in Hebrew 2, whose class includes many native speakers, took place in another room, Parks said. 

Bringing down costs is a major part of what Parks is expected to accomplish, according to Benzaquen. He said he is working with her to decrease the school’s budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and they are aiming to keep annual tuition relatively affordable, at $12,000. 

“We need to help with Jewish education, to make it more accessible,” he said.

The school moved because it needed more space. It is renting 10 classrooms on the third floor of the WJCC, which last year had been rented to Shalhevet School while that school’s new campus was being built. This arrangement has financial benefits because the WJCC pays for security, maintenance and utilities, Parks said. 

“We’re hoping to stay for three years,” she said.

Although there is not much mingling between the students and the WJCC members, Parks said some of the female GAON students have been volunteering at the WJCC preschool as a way to earn community service credit.

Using the LAUSD curriculum, part of the City of Angels School Virtual Academy (an individualized, Western Association of Schools and Colleges accredited instruction program of LAUSD), and the SMC Hebrew instructors contribute to GAON’s cost-cutting measures. Both are provided at no cost to GAON through an agreement with LAUSD. In contrast, last year the school paid for a private online general studies curriculum and used expensive distance learning for Hebrew instruction, in which students engaged via Skype with instructors based in Israel.  

Parks said the school is currently working on earning affiliation with Builders of Jewish Edcation, a resource for Jewish day schools in Southern California. 

For now, the school is enjoying its new moniker, digs and curriculum. Additionally, the Harkham GAON Academy Lions, which have hired an athletics director, are developing basketball, flag football, volleyball and soccer teams, according to school leadership. 

“The thing that’s exciting for me is it’s a new school. … I’m really looking forward to rejuvenating the school spirit through athletics,” said Kevin Trice, director of the athletics program. “I’m just very excited about that.”

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