Goals and Vision (excerpts from remarks on Jan. 13)

Thank you for coming this evening. Your presence reflects your passion and love for B'nai Shalom - our community's day school.

The overarching goal of the Board of Trustees is to assure that a viable, dynamic Jewish day school will continue to flourish in Greensboro, North Carolina, just as it has for the past 39 years.

Next year, we will celebrate the end of our first 40 years!

I want to tell you how sorry I am about the angst this issue has caused for some of you. In retrospect, we would have envisioned a different process - one that had a meeting like this one prior to the board vote. What happened ended generating mistrust and rumors. We hope that one of the outcomes of tonight's meeting is to design a way that this will not happen again.

I envision B'nai Shalom's graduates - and there will be many - as products of a school of rigorous academic achievement, supported by values and character education based on Judaism's legal and ethical source texts. Our graduates will deeply identify with Jewish religious tradition through shared Hebrew language and a community of Jewish culture. Thanks to this rich background, they will be solidly grounded in their ethical views and moral commitments, and likely to achieve contentment and success in their professions and family lives. They will feel a strong sense of belonging in their school, their communities and their culture.

The shared experience of a "B'nai Shalom education" will stay with them always. When they reach high school and college, they will feel strongly connected to their fellow alumni as well as other day school graduates. In their adult communities, they will become leaders in the Jewish arena as well as active in local causes. They will continue to love and support the State of Israel. In short, they will achieve academic excellence and internalize moral values in order to reach full potential as learners, thinkers and leaders.