FOUR YEARS AGO, SAR HIGH SCHOOL OPENED with 68 students and a grand vision for Jewish secondary education.

On June 13, these students will graduate from the Riverdale school, marking a milestone for the once-fledgling school, whose student body has swelled to more than 300 students.

“Other kids from other schools are like, ‘I’m so happy, I can’t wait to get out,’ ” said one senior, Shoshana Bar-David, 18. “And I’m like, why?”

It’s true — these kids love school. And the feeling is mutual. The school’s philosophy puts the individual student’s needs at the top of the priority list.

“The administration knows all the kids by name,” said the school’s principal, Rabbi Tully Harcsztark. “The kids feel supported and they feel like their needs are responded to in an individual kind of way.”

Harcsztark, 42, is an SAR veteran, having previously served as assistant principal of the elementary school for eight years.

SAR’s award-winning elementary school occupies a highly regarded place in Jewish education, well-known for its open architecture — the “school without walls.”

But it took a long time for enough people to throw their support behind a high school.
“From a financial perspective and a demographic perspective, the question was, was it worth it?” Harcsztark said.

Over the years, a clearer picture emerged of the need for the school. Riverdale now has a sizable modern Orthodox population, and the type of modern Orthodox education that was once the norm in Jewish secondary schools was starting to lose the “modern” aspect of the idea and focus only on the “Orthodox.”

So Harcsztark signed on, and spent a year visiting schools throughout the United States gathering ideas.

“They all have a general philosophy that is very student-centered and they take seriously how kids develop as people, in addition to the courses that they take,” he said.

“It was very exciting to try to clarify a vision and then try to put that into practice.” The challenge, he said, was “developing a sense of trust in parents and kids that they wouldn’t be losing out.”

Members of the inaugural class admitted some initial skepticism.

“I actually didn’t want to go,” said Abe Schacter-Gampel, 18, an SAR elementary school graduate and Yonkers resident. “My parents were like, ‘Rah-rah SAR.’ I was ready for something new. I was ready for a high school that was actually already established.”
For those students who were graduating from more traditional elementary schools, SAR High School represented an intriguing new possibility.

Louisa Brinn moved from Jacksonville, Florida, to live with family friends in Mount Kisco so she could attend the school.

“I wasn’t so much looking forward to going to public school,” Brinn said. And Rami Levi, 17, a Teaneck resident who had gone to school in Englewood, was impressed by the school’s open house. “I could see that they were not trying to open just another yeshiva high school,” Levi said.

The school’s appeal wasn’t just limited to students.

After teaching at Yeshivah of Flatbush for seven years, Rabbi Jonathan Kroll joined SAR as an assistant principal. “The opportunity to be involved in a program that was created from scratch was very appealing,” said Kroll, 36. “I like the school’s philosophy — unabashed modern Orthodoxy that speaks to individual kids where they are and thinks about individual kids where they can be.”

The school that opened in 2003 is not the same school that exists today. Some of the ideas it started with — no tracking of students per the elementary school’s philosophy, and no Regents exams — gave way to a tracking system and five Regents.

SAR may have been different, but it had to face some academic realities. But the main change everyone talks about involves discipline.

Kroll neatly summed up the problem: “It’s a hard message to hear — ‘trust, respect but you have to do this.’ ‘But don’t you trust me and respect me?’ they would ask.” “When we came in there were no rules,” said Brinn, 18. “Not to say that it was madness. It was just us.”

Administrators phrase the issue in more circumspect fashion.

“Sometimes, appealing purely to senses of responsibility — trust in the individual—may have been perhaps a little too much for a number of kids,” said Kroll. “Freshman year, if a kid missed a class, you’d say, “You gotta go to class.’ Third year of theschool, it was no longer merely a conversation.”

Now, a student has to stay after school if they miss a class. “That was really the challenge — how to balance a trusting and relatively open environment with the structure kids need in high school,” Harcsztark said. But, he said, the school usually tries not to rely on rules. “We have a lot of what we’ve come to call ‘patient badgering,’ ” Harcsztark explained.

The other main challenge, Harcsztark said, is instilling the school’s modern Orthodox philosophy in students.

“A lot of them think modern Orthodoxy is a compromise,” he said. “They realize, it’s actually a much harder idea, not a softer compromise.”

“It’s like the complete package for an Orthodox person looking for a high school,” said Schacter-Gampel. “The school’s seriously frum, but we’re also really open. We discuss kol isha (the prohibition upon men to listen to a woman singing) and women’s tefillah.”

The constant dialogue, Kroll said, helps maintain trust between teachers and students. “There’s a certain openness and transparency,” he said, then smiled as he considered his surroundings.
The SAR building on Netherland Avenue largely consists of large panes of glass, allowing one to see classes and presentations happening on every floor.

It may not be one big classroom like the elementary school, but it feels like one.
As Kroll said, “The architecture of the building is something of a metaphor for the way things aim to run here.”

Now on the brink of graduation, seniors say they were lucky to be guinea pigs in the SAR High School experiment.

“I think being part of the first class was a really incredible experience because you’re really able to shape the future,” said Bar-David, a Riverdale resident who started attending SAR in nursery school. “If you were interested in starting a club, you started it yourself.”

Schacter-Gampel took advantage of this opportunity, starting a boys’ cooking club.

With an annual tuition of more than $20,000, the school can afford to fund visiting scholars in the Beit Midrash Fellows and Artist-in-Residence programs. Members work with students in addition to focusing on their own learning and projects.

All this individual attention is a luxury one doesn’t always get in a big college—and the students are headed to some big colleges, after most of them (about 90 percent) learn for a year in Israel.

Bar-David is going to Barnard, Levi to Columbia, Schacter-Gampel and Brinn to NYU.
“It was nice to be exposed to this kind ofenvironment and take away what we can to the real world,” said Levi.

And Brinn, who has spent the past four years living away from her family, hasthrived. She participates in mock trial and is editor of “The Hive,” the newly named yearbook.

“I found the best friends in the world,” she said. WJC