Anne Marie Ullman of Jewish Community High School of the Bay can’t talk about graduation. The theater teacher is planning it, but she has to keep mum. That’s because a lot of it is a surprise.
“We’re trying to make the event as special as we can,” she explained. “And extremely personalized.”
While 2020 was a year of graduation-by-Zoom, with schools striving to make a virtual departure meaningful for students, this year the challenge is different. After a school year marked by remote learning and cohorts and masks, Jewish high schools and middle schools across the Bay Area are working within Covid restrictions to make graduation as meaningful as possible for seniors and graduating eighth-graders.
Tehiyah Day School s last act: grants for East Bay students – J jweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Part Four of OUR PANDEMIC YEAR, a week-long series examining how the Covid pandemic has changed our local Jewish world.
“I think we’re all wondering what’s going to happen.” That was Contra Costa Jewish Day School parent Liat Egel speaking to J. a year ago. It was March 2020 and her two kids, like all children in the Bay Area, were suddenly faced with shuttered schools and an abrupt switch to online learning.
It was a time of uncertainty as teachers and parents tried to cope with a world nobody had planned for. But contacted by J. one year later, Egel was much cheerier, happy that both of her kids were back in the classroom: CCJDS in Lafayette was one of the many Jewish schools granted a waiver for reopening last fall.