By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
It took meeting the candidates for the position to convince Maria Erlitz that she truly wanted it for herself.
“I fell in love with the place yet again,” Erlitz said. “I think I had to go through the process of seeing myself not here to know that I really wanted to be here and see the school through the long term.”
The Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle, which turns 30 next year, has had Erlitz’s fingerprints all over it from the beginning. As one of its co-founders, Erlitz served on the lay side as a longtime board member, including president. She moved over to the professional side when both the head of school and assistant head of school simultaneously left JDS, and she resigned from the board to act as interim head until a replacement came.
She served as head of school and assistant head on both interim and permanent bases in intervening years before moving on to a successful career as a consultant working with heads of school at other Jewish academies. But when JDS’ previous head of school, Tom Elieff, decided to move back to his hometown in 2008, the board asked Erlitz to come back while it conducted a search for a new leader.
She was clear from the start that the position would be temporary, but then something changed.
“[Board president Robert Sulkin] was always saying as the candidates came… ‘No need to worry about anything, Maria can act as a coach,’” Erlitz said. “Usually, when I coach a head of school, I get to what their agenda is and help them to develop their agenda. I kept thinking, ‘What about my agenda?’ I couldn’t take myself out of the picture.”
Sulkin said she didn’t need to convince the board to hire her permanently.
“It was always open to her,” he said. “Maria always could have had the job. And I made that clear to her.”
The students are apparently excited to have Erlitz onboard as well: They spent the week surprising their principal with different activities, including a rainy-day soccer game for which she had to postpone her interview with JTNews.
But Erlitz faces some challenges the school must overcome, most notably due to the economy. Enrollment, she and Sulkin both said, is down.
“All of the independent schools lost enrollment, so private school is looked at as a luxury in some places,” Erlitz said. “When a parent lost a job…they felt they couldn’t afford that.”
One of the promises she made last year to parents was that no child would be denied an education at JDS due to inability to pay. They made good on that promise, but at a cost.
“It doubled our financial aid line,” Erlitz said.
Part of the way the school made up for that loss was by eliminating six full-time positions, though Sulkin emphasized none of those cuts affected the quality of the education.
“We’ve cut no programs, no teachers,” Sulkin said. “The programming has actually been increased, which is amazing considering what is going on elsewhere.”
But with many parents having been laid off from the region’s business titans, the money to cover a private school education needs to come from somewhere. One way is through vigorous fundraising. Erlitz, Sulkin said, is key to that.
“Any great institution needs strong leadership, and people buy into her vision and have great respect for her,” Sulkin said.
But the school also approached the Samis Foundation, which already partially subsidizes K-12 students in Washington State’s Jewish day schools, for further assistance.
“We were afraid we would really lose a good chunk of the school, so we went to Samis and basically asked them for help,” Erlitz said. “We said, if you live in the Orthodox community you send a child to a Jewish day school. That’s just it.… Our parent body chooses this school. It’s not a natural if they lost a job that they would send their kid anyway.”
Samis responded with a $400,000 matching grant that would give $2 for every $1 donated to JDS. They also helped with financial planning that Erlitz said will hopefully keep the school on a more sustainable footing.
Despite the challenges, when Erlitz stepped in last year as interim head, she didn’t want to act as merely a caretaker. She instituted an enrichment program to help kids whose intelligence levels rose above the challenges of the dual Jewish-general curriculum.
“We found that we were losing students to gifted schools,” Erlitz said. “Once we put the enrichment piece in, we didn’t lose a single child.”
She is also working to institute what she called “character education” throughout the curriculum.
“Especially as a Jewish day school, it’s woven into our values,” she said, but this new program will have a code of ethics to which teachers, students and their parents will all adhere.
One big difference Erlitz has seen in the school since she was last involved is in the makeup of the students, which she sees as much more of a microcosm of the greater Jewish community than in the past.
“We draw from such a wide variety of not only ZIP codes, but denominations. We have kids here with tzitzit, we have kids who don’t belong anywhere, kids whose parents are intermarried. Just the widest range of Jewish practice,” she said. “We have to service that microcosm in a way the school has not done before.”