Eighth grade students crowd their hallway afterschool on Sept. 15. The increase of 50 students to the Upper School, pushing enrollment over 600, necessitated the addition of a third lunch period.

Entering its second year in the Lerner Family campus, the Upper School is seeing unprecedented increases in enrollment, which, if they continue, threaten to fill the Upper School to capacity within the next few years.

This year, enrollment in the Upper School increased by approximately 50 students, about twice the enrollment increase from last year, according to Director of Upper School Admissions Robin Shapiro. Owing to a number of factors, 67 brand new students are enrolled in the Upper School this year, compared to last year’s figure of 48.

Of the 67 brand new students, 42 are seventh graders, a figure which almost doubles last year’s figure of 24. The remaining 25 students are enrolled all other grades but twelfth.

Shapiro cites a variety of reasons for the greatly increased number of brand new students in the Upper School. The additional space created by the new Upper School campus and a growing interest among Jewish teenagers and pre-teens to receive a Jewish education are among the chief causes of the increase, according to Shapiro.

“We’ve had so many kids who have gone to Jewish camps or gone to Israel, and they’ve been so turned on by their experience that whether they’re going into eighth, ninth or tenth grades, they want to come get a Jewish education,” she said. “We don’t want to say ‘no’ to them.”

In the past, it was difficult for public school students transferring into grades other than seven and nine to catch up in their Judaic studies and be on par with their classmates, according to Shapiro.

To meet the increased demand for admission from public school students entering those grades, the school plans to “slot an ulpan program during the summer. We’re going to run an ulpan bet, and we’re going to teach rabbinics and Jewish history, if need be, to make it easier for those students to come into the school and have those credits,” Shapiro said.

The larger student body, however, has caused logistical problems in the lunch schedule. The current seventh grade’s 135 students pushed Upper School enrollment over 600, but the cafeteria has a maximum capacity of only 275 people, forcing the administration to add a third lunch period to the schedule.

“This is clearly a matter of space. Lunch would be too big if there were only two shifts,” said Dean Roslyn Landy, who designed the new schedule.

“We always knew that we’d have to go to three lunches, but we did not think that it would come as fast as it did, in the second year in the new school,” Landy said.

To match the growing student body, 15 new faculty, including a guidance counselor, special needs coordinator and librarian’s assistant, were hired over the summer. The addition of 12 new teachers has allowed class sizes to remain the same, the average size hovering between 15 and 18 students.

According to Landy, the addition of new class sections and blocks to the schedule has made it so there will be periods when classes occupy all the classrooms.

Still, there is some, albeit little, room to grow. According to Principal Rabbi Reuven Greenvald, the Upper School is built to accommodate approximately 650-700 students. With recent trends pointing to significantly larger seventh grade classes, however, the building may reach capacity within the next few years, according to Director of the Middle School Joan Vander Walde.

Nevertheless, the issue has not yet been widely discussed.

“It’s something we have to discuss next year,” Vander Walde said. “We need to make predictions about when the school will be filled.”

“This year, one of the priorities is to put a cap on the number of new kids we admit next year,” Shapiro said. “But we’re committed to accepting students from our feeder schools, HDI and JPDS-NC, and giving them an Upper School education at JDS.” According to Shapiro, however, the class sizes at HDI and JPDS-NC are decreasing, easing the burden on JDS.

Despite the potential problems that the current rate of increase in enrollment may pose should it continue, the administration remains happy that enrollment is rising.

“It’s really exciting that we are reaching older kids who have been in a non-day school setting,” Shapiro said. “These are kids from public schools and non-Jewish private schools who are interested in a Jewish education, and we’re able to give it to them. We’re ecstatic.”