Discussing Size

I often find myself in conversations with parents about how great JAWC has been for my kid. Generally the other parent tells me why they didn’t send their child to JAWC. Often that reason is size related, but usually the fellow parent never looked at the school or talked to Rabbi Aaron about it.

Many parents say “The school is to small" based on conversations they have had with other families who have not sent their children to JAWC. Instead, if the same parents would actually take a good look at what the school has to offer, they may discover something promising. If they then talk about it with fellow parents, a portion of them will also look and some will enroll their kids. The school would no longer be considered “too small”.

The second size related reason is “Socially, my child needs more kids in a class.” I have an extremely social child. Socially, she is perfectly happy in her small class (10 children, k-2). She is friends with every girl in the class. (Boys are almost a different species from the six year old girl’s perspective.) I know that any of those girls can come to my home after school and play quite happily with my daughter, and I’m happy to send her to any of her classmate’s homes. Besides her classmates, she has also maintained friendships from preschool and developed new friendships through extracurricular activities. She has plenty of friends. In a class of 25 kids, how many children is one child really friends with?

I’m not criticizing people for choosing to send their children to other schools after looking at all their options, and some parents do exhaustive research. I am frustrated by the tendancy that some parents have to exclude JAWC from that research because of its size. The small size is not a problem for the children, and if more parents enroll their children each year, it will grow.