North Shore Hebrew Academy High School

We believe in educating our children, not merely schooling them. Our school is a place where thinking, analyzing, imagining, and creating are encouraged, nurtured, and rewarded. We don’t want our students to learn merely for the sake of passing a test. We want them to develop intellectual curiosity and the skills with which to satisfy it. We know that learning begins with questions; we teach our students how to make productive inquiries.

We are committed to providing the best education we can for all the children we admit. That involves identifying an individual child’s optimum learning style and providing those experiences for him or her that will effect maximum intellectual, social, and emotional growth. There is a way to reach every child; we are experts at finding those ways.

We know that we need to teach more than academic course content. As Modern Orthodox Jews, our children are expected to strive for success as they live in and engage with the modern world while still being faithful to the religious teachings of our Torah and our sages. So while we give our students the tools to succeed in the secular arena, we make sure they understand the benefits of living their lives as ethical, Torah Jews. We know our students will have to do a balancing act; we are dedicated to showing them how to achieve that balance.

We foster in our students an overwhelming commitment to religious Zionism. As a result of numerous programs which involve them in activities in support of Israel, our students reach a level of maturity in their years with us that permits them to go out into the world armed with the skills to face the realities of the world in which they must live. We know our students will face challenges; we equip them to deal with them effectively.

This kind of education must be seen as the basic right of all students in our school. Classes will be co-educational and will seek to accommodate the needs of many different kinds of students by exposing them to a variety of spiritual and intellectual perspectives. In this light, we will encourage individual students to bring their own unique insights and interpretations to the curriculum.

A primary purpose of the school’s program will be to enable each individual student to discover his or her own calling, be it in the classroom texts, the sciences, the arts, or the extracurricular realm. This will, of course, coincide with our commitment to give students the tools and the drive to succeed on the highest academic levels after they graduate. Yet it will serve an even greater responsibility: nurturing every student’s creativity and self-esteem in the area that best suits him or her during these most formative years.

All knowledge, be it religious or secular, stems from the Creator of the universe. The North Shore Hebrew Academy High School will be similarly driven by a commitment to academic excellence in General Studies. Through first-rate training in the analytic and quantitative reasoning that underlies such fields as chemistry and physics, students will not only hone their skills and overall scholastic aptitudes, but will gain a direct appreciation for that which the philosopher, Pythagoras, liked to call, “harmony of the spheres.” Equal emphasis will be placed upon the greater works of our classical heritage, from the foundational rigor of Euclid to the lyrical expressiveness of Shakespeare. The learning of basic skills will be combined with a sophisticated understanding of literature and Western thought. Thus enriched, our students will meet the admissions criteria and standards of the most selective institutions of higher learning. Yet, far more important, they will graduate with a highly developed and deeply thoughtful approach to the world around them.

A superior academic program is critical to a school’s success, but so are the values it imparts. If there is one value above all else that we hope to instill in our students, it is chesed, a commitment to acts of righteousness, kindness, and generosity. Schools and communities do not exist in an educational vacuum: these students enter the world with an obligation toward those around them that stems directly from their Jewish heritage. This begins with their daily activities, especially, bein adam le’chaveiro, from one human being to another, and extends to an overall responsibility toward the needy and the less fortunate. It is our duty to uphold these values in educating our children and to insure that they grow into adults who will do the same.