February 25, 2009

It’s 11:30 a.m. on an overcast Saturday, and high school juniors Dakota Glueck and Jimmy Biblarz are sitting on their desks in a second-floor classroom, counting how many species of fruit flies they can name. Somewhere after D. melanogaster, the shaggy-haired teens get stuck on a multi-syllabic word and furrow their brows.

“I think that’s a cichlid,” Biblarz says.

“No, dude, that’s a fly,” Glueck replies.

This isn’t the first weekend the boys have given over to the study of scientific trivia. In fact, by late January, they and seven other schoolmates at Hamilton High School had been meeting together for almost a year to parse dense texts in biology, history, music, literature and art in preparation for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Academic Decathlon.

Held in two rounds Jan. 31 and Feb. 7, the 28th annual bowl pitted teams from 64 high schools across the district against each other for a chance to represent Los Angeles at the state competition in March and a shot at the national championship. About 580 student decathletes donned game faces and school colors to take part in the grueling Super Quiz event at UCLA, hoping to prove their academic prowess. In the packed bleachers overlooking the competition, the message was clear: being brainy rules.

But Los Angeles’ hard-working pupils might lose this longstanding outlet to flex their mental muscles if funding for the program dries up, district officials fear.

“We’re all under major budget pressure in LAUSD,” said Cliff Ker, coordinator of the LAUSD Academic Decathlon. “This program is no exception.”

Funding for Academic Decathlon had been shaky even before Ker took over as coordinator in 2000. At its peak, the district’s budget for the program was about $275,000. Last year, it was about one-third of that.

Even if the district pays for 2010 competition costs, such as facilities and equipment rental, schools will have to buy the official study guides and cover travel expenses themselves — costs previously covered by the district, Ker said.

“The full impact of what the budget cuts have meant for Academic Decathlon has not really hit the schools yet,” he said.

The program is one of many facing an uncertain future as the country’s second-largest school district anticipates a shortfall of at least $250 million this year due to the state financial crisis. The potential loss of more than 2,000 teacher jobs, arts education and funding for reduced-price school meals has largely overshadowed cuts to smaller programs such as Academic Decathlon, which has become an institution in LAUSD.

Los Angeles teams have won 15 state competitions and 10 U.S. championships since the national Academic Decathlon was founded in 1981. Jewish students and coaches have long helped fuel the success of the district, where El Camino Real and Taft high schools most frequently clinch first place.

“It’s really impressive,” Ker said. “For a school district that gets kicked around all the time for not doing the best it can for its students, our Academic Decathlon kids are always phenomenal.”

But the ultimate goal of the program is not just another trophy in the case, he stressed.

“You have all these high school kids that are very competitive and very bright, but some of them have not come close to hitting their potential in high school yet,” Ker said. “Then they get involved in Academic Decathlon, and all of a sudden, something clicks with them. Kids learn that through a lot of hard work and teamwork, they can begin to approach their academic potential.”

One Saturday morning a few weeks before the competition, the Hamilton High School team was beginning its fourth quiz of the day before noon, answering questions in evolutionary biology such as how many genes the first vertebrates had, and what the “Pitx1” gene of a stickleback fish codes for.

Over kung-pow chicken and egg rolls on their lunch break, the students recalled giving up their entire third week of winter break, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., to prepare for testing. The miraculous thing, however, was that they didn’t mind. “We have a great time,” team member Glueck explained. “We have a really good team and we love each other.”

That bond was evident at the John Wooden Center at UCLA on Feb. 7, where the 64 LAUSD teams gathered to face off at the high-energy Super Quiz, the final event of the competition. A, B and C-level students — each team is comprised of three students of each academic level — competed against each other, with seven seconds to answer tough questions on genetics, Charles Darwin’s theories and adaptation.

District officials won’t know whether LAUSD will have money in its budget to fund the program next year until after the state competition March 13-16. “I hope we have a competition, but I have no guarantees or assurances,” Ker said.

Hamilton won’t be traveling to Sacramento for the state championship — El Camino Real took top honors again this year and will represent LAUSD along with eight other qualifying teams.

But to Hamilton senior Gabe Rimmon, who also takes classes at L.A. Hebrew High School, it was more about the experience than the score.

“I’m glad I did it,” Rimmon said. “You win some, you lose some. I’m just glad we made it this far.”

Two-dozen fifth- and sixth-graders wave their hands wildly in the air. Teacher Eli Katzoff scans the classroom, but doesn’t have time to pick a student before they all speak at once. The students are role-playing a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, debating issues of security and refugee rights with an intensity that makes them lunge out of their seats and crowd the front of the room.

By the excitement on their faces, one could hardly tell these kids are in school during winter break.

For about 50 West Valley kids last December, winter break meant time for camp — or something close to it. The students took part in Nisayon, a new Hebrew school program at the West Hills campus of Temple Judea that turns the traditional religious school schedule on its head. Instead of going to class on Sundays and after school throughout the year, kids meet for two solid weeks in the summer and one week in the winter for a full-day experience. In between, monthly family and holiday events, mandatory Shabbat attendance and weekly in-home Hebrew tutoring keep the kids connected.

“We felt that religious school should be so enjoyable that kids love being there,” said Rabbi Bruce Raff, director of education at Temple Judea and founder of the program. “Every kid loves going to camp. Most kids don’t love going to religious school. Why not take the best of both worlds and create something that works?”

A typical day at Nisayon (which means “experiment”) consists of two 1 1/2-hour class sessions, Israeli dance, Hebrew songs and school-wide prayer. Kids also take part in electives, such as the Israeli martial art system krav maga, videography or drama. Last summer, “campers” swam, took cooking lessons, made mosaics, planted trees around the synagogue’s grounds and made care packages for Israel Defense Forces soldiers.

Each year, the whole school studies the same topic, such as Israel, the Jewish calendar or Torah. At the end of each day, the whole school comes together for “community time,” where each age group shares what they’ve learned.

“It’s not enough to sit next to your friend in class and share the fact that you both don’t like your Hebrew school teacher. That doesn’t build community,” Raff said. “What builds community is when kids enjoy the learning process together. Then, what they learn becomes what they live.”

Synagogues across Los Angeles are experimenting with religious school programs in an effort to fit working parents’ busy schedules and appeal to students who don’t get much out of weekly class sessions, said Janice Tytell, head consultant for religious schools at the Bureau of Jewish Education in Los Angeles (BJE). Hebrew schools are incorporating family Shabbatons into their curricula and hosting kid-only sleepovers that let students learn outside the classroom.

“Programs where the children have fun learning together enhance the formal learning process — they add a shared emotional experience,” Tytell said.

Families are included, too. Six times during the year, parents are invited in for Sunday afternoon learning sessions with their children so they can share the experience. Families must also participate in at least four Shabbat services during the year, including two Nisayon Shabbat dinners.

Nisayon brings instruction directly into students’ homes, as well — instead of cramming Hebrew-language classes into the program’s three jam-packed weeks, lessons take place weekly throughout the year with a private tutor. The program costs $2,630 for kids in grades four to six who choose one-on-one tutoring, or $1,765 if students buddy up for two-on-one tutoring. The total cost is $800 for kids in grades kindergarten through third, who don’t receive Hebrew tutoring.

Temple Judea also offers more traditional Hebrew school programs — the synagogue’s religious school is the largest in Los Angeles with about 800 kids — including a twice-weekly class for $1,475. But Raff believes Nisayon is a better fit for children who respond to hands-on learning.

Robin Solomon, of Encino, had enrolled her daughter in weekly Hebrew school programs at Temple Judea and Valley Beth Shalom before coming to Nisayon. She said the unconventional atmosphere there was a boon to both her children.

“It’s camp — it’s fun,” Solomon said, recalling how her kids last summer helped build a replica of Israel in the field outside the synagogue, complete with a kiddie pool filled with mud to simulate the Dead Sea. “There is no differentiation between fun and learning, so they’re absorbing the knowledge at a very high rate. They’re glad to get up in the morning and come home exhausted at night. It’s a very rich experience.”

That much was evident at the program’s daily prayer service. When volunteers were needed to lead prayers on one particular day, most of the hands in the room shot up.

Before coming to Nisayon, Rachel Nassiri, 11, didn’t know the words to the “Shema.” But sitting in the sanctuary with the rest of the school, she sang along cheerfully to a melody accompanied by guitar. “We do it every day, and the teachers make it fun, so it’s easy to learn,” she explained.

“This is better than going to [Hebrew] school every week,” she said, helping to collect prayer books after the service. “When I started here, I didn’t know anyone, but now I have a bunch of friends.”

Registration is now under way for the 2009-2010 school year. To learn more, visit Innovative Hebrew School Evokes Student Enthusiasm Read More »

The opening scene in a trailer for “We Must Remember,” a student documentary about the Holocaust, shows high school senior Tyler Nielsen skateboarding down a wide tree-lined street on a sunny day in Southern California. But the film Nielsen and 15 of his classmates began working on last spring took them from their cozy beachside community of Carlsbad, north of San Diego, to the barbed-wire-enclosed camps of Dachau and Auschwitz.

What started in 2007 as a lesson in amateur filmmaking at Carlsbad High School quickly swelled into an ambitious $200,000 educational project that now aims to change how the Holocaust is taught at middle schools across Southern California.

“We Must Remember,” a 33-minute documentary, began in the Carlsbad High School Television broadcast journalism class taught by Doug Green, who for 10 years has led a nationally recognized program that has garnered 17 Emmys in the student category. Searching for a more meaningful way to teach one of the darkest chapters of history to American students who are proving to be less and less captivated by World War II — a 2008 Boston Globe article cited a study that showed nearly 25 percent of 17-year-olds polled don’t know who Hitler was — Green came up with the idea of taking students to a concentration camp and having them film their experience.

Initially, the funding for the equipment and trip had to be scraped together in small amounts from various sources, including fundraising car washes and grants. The students had to pay for their own trip to Germany or raise the $3,000.

Brent Roach, 16, eagerly signed up for the project, excited to learn about the process of producing a documentary. Many of the other students, only one of whom is Jewish, thought visiting Germany would be an awesome experience.

The students, whose Holocaust education was mostly limited to a mandatory reading of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in eighth grade and for some, a cursory overview of World War II in 11th grade, arrived in Dachau and in their own words, “were totally unprepared” for what they saw.

The film chronicles these students’ journey of discovery as they visit Dachau, Auschwitz and Birkenau, interview German high school students, tour the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., pore through archived footage and interview Holocaust survivors in their own community.

They learned to shoot footage, edit film and even speak a little German. But those were the small lessons.

They discovered that in Germany, you rarely see a German flag displayed on someone’s home, because Germans feel ashamed to be patriotic. They were a little stunned and disturbed to hear a young German student say that they are taught the Holocaust every year and are “kind of sick of it already.” They were frightened to stumble upon a neo-Nazi rally in Dachau organized by the increasingly popular extremist National Democratic Party. They struggled to maintain composure as they saw photos of children disfigured by starvation and torture.

They also met survivors in Southern California who had been their age during the Holocaust, and who, even after 60 years, were unable to speak about their experiences without choking up. And along the way, they adopted a mission to spread their newly acquired passion for Holocaust awareness to middle school students as they are first introduced to the subject.

“The students will be able to connect more to us,” said Brent, who felt the urgency of their undertaking when a survivor died days before they were supposed to interview him. “They will be learning though us, through our first-hand exploration of the subject, instead of from some old man with a British accent.”

James Farley, the president of the Leichtag Family Foundation, which donated $100,000 to the project, saw a six-minute trailer for the documentary early on in the project and was struck by its authenticity and integrity. The foundation — one of the founders of the U.S. Holocaust Museum — saw an opportunity to support a “unique and provocative way to change the landscape of Holocaust education.”

“We want to get it to as many schools as possible,” said Lisa Posard, the mom-turned-executive producer and fundraiser for the film. Several schools in San Diego, as well as a school district in Florida, have signed on to include the film and the accompanying curriculum, now being developed by the students, in their Holocaust lesson plans. Other Southern California schools have also expressed interest in utilizing the film. There is even talk of having the documentary translated into other languages and shown to European students, Posard said.

In the past year, “We Must Remember” has attracted local coverage in San Diego’s newspapers, magazines and television news shows. The documentary premiered at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival this month, where it sold out three theaters. And on March 30 the film is being screened at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills in an honorary salute to Hollywood by the American Society for Yad Vashem and The Jewish Life Foundation.

“It’s like this project has been sprinkled with magic fairy dust,” Posard said. “Everything has come together so well and the momentum is tremendous.”

For more information on the documentary and to view a trailer, visit Student-Created Film Aims to Teach Holocaust Anew Read More »