Yeshiva Elementary School, an institution closely linked to the West Side Twerski community, is facing space issues, with a student population that has grown by about 25 percent since 1999.
Administrators are making plans for expansion. Construction could begin in the next couple years, to physically grow the Orthodox school at 5115 W. Keefe Ave.
In 1999, before a 2001 expansion, the school had 164 students. Today, it typically hovers between 205 and 210, said Rabbi Aryeh Borsuk, director of advancement and administration for the school.
At present, the gymnasium is sometimes divided by a draped divider into a lunchroom and a gym space, making it tight for both purposes, Borsuk said. “And we’ll have some classes eat lunch in the classroom, but if a class is eating lunch in the classroom that means the teachers don’t have a prep period because they have the supervised lunch. It’s cascading; we’re making it work, but it’s really no longer meeting our needs.”
Also, if there’s a need to split up a class of students in half, there aren’t any good options to accommodate that, he said. Last year, some parents asked if a class that looked to be large could be split in two (in the end, it was not as large as expected). “And one of our answers to them was, we don’t have anywhere to put these children,” Borsuk said. “You don’t want to have ten 5-year-olds or 12 5-year-olds in a windowless basement room all year. It’s not healthy for the kids. What they need is light and space.”
And yet there is no immediate crisis. Yeshiva Elementary School numbers are not expected to quickly pop up. The school tracks the number of pre-school children in West Side families, while allowing for people moving in and out of the community, or making other choices for schooling. Borsuk thinks of the current moment more as “intelligent planning.”
Borsuk said: “Our goal is to have two more classrooms so we can split more classes as needed to accommodate more students when the need arises.”
The school largely serves the West Side Orthodox community – Congregation Beth Jehudah, the shul led by generations of Twerski rabbis, is little more than a ten-minute walk away. For high school after graduation, students will many times go to school out of town, or to the Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study. But until then, YES is often the school of choice on the West Side, which is why change is in the wind.
“Just because we make the building fit,” Borsuk said, “doesn’t mean it’s actually fitting our needs well.”
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