Sinai Schools to Hit Riverdale
Source: The Jewish Week
The Sinai Schools, a network of Jewish special education institutions that began in 1982 with three students at one site in New Jersey and has grown to six locations with 150 students in the state, will establish its first branch in New York City next year. Sinai has announced that it will open a “school within a school” at the SAR Academy in the Riverdale section of the Bronx beginning in September 2018. Aura Lurie, who has served as a teacher for more than a decade in the SAR Academy “inclusion” special education program, will be director of the Sinai pilot program at SAR.
Lurie will spend the next year finding space at SAR for the Sinai program, hiring teachers, interviewing prospective students and studying the Sinai approach to special education. She says the program is unique — “there’s a need for it.”
The initial Sinai program at SAR will include about a dozen students, ages 6-8, with “a wide range of complex learning challenges and/or developmental disabilities,” Sinai announced. As at the extant Sinai schools, participating boys and girls will be part of the wider student life at SAR, joining other students in activities like prayer services and playground recreation, and being mainstreamed into some classes when their academic abilities allow.