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Several of the policies that were previously in existence are now more rigorous. “There have always been guards on both doors [at both campuses], but now the entry and exit policy is stricter in terms of the level of ID required to admit someone who is not familiar to the building,” said Head of School Jonathan Cannon. “It is not possible to enter the building except through the main entrance to the building.” Israel trip to proceed despite year-old Intifada The annual senior trip to Israel and Poland is scheduled to take place despite growing concerns among students and parents about the recent escalation of violence in the Middle East. “The situation in America and Israel and all around the world means that certainties of a few years ago are not certainties now, and while we cannot affect international policy, we can and will plan to send a trip [to Israel] on the hope and assumption that the world will look very different in a few months time,” Head of School Jonathan Cannon said at a meeting about the trip for seniors and their parents on Oct. 11. Cannon emphasized that each individual family must decide whether its student will participate in the trip. A working committee was formed in September with the primary goals of evaluating the trip’s programming and looking at the safety and security of the situation in Israel, according to Principal Rabbi Reuven Greenvald. The committee is composed of Greenvald, Cannon, School Life Coordinator Navah Kelman, Alumna Laura Blumenthal (’97), seventh grade parent Jonathan Band and former Board President Annette Forseter, who is also the mother of Karen, (’97). Of despair and loneliness in dire times: Arena adds new dimension to Steinbeck masterpiece With the dusty black set at the opening scene of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, now showing at the Arena Stage, one can immediately empathize with the sparse, lonely lives of ‘bindle stiffs,’ the itinerant ranch workers whose lives are the subject of this work. Of Mice and Men, which opened on Nov. 1 and runs through Dec. 9, superbly portrays the lives of these workers trying to cope with a dire social climate and with their own complicated interpersonal relationships. Jonathan Cannon Difficult times call for commitment to values The diversity of our school community is a defining characteristic and also a challenge. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a sixteenth century French writer, said, “There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.” At CES JDS, we celebrate that diversity, and all those who work within the school are daily confronted with the need to make decisions in a sea of wildly differing opinions as to what that decision should be. The job of the decision maker is to weigh up all of the input and also use his or her knowledge of the context within which a decision is being made to come to a conclusion. |
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