Tag: Russ Klein

King David High School head of school Russ Klein. (photo by Pat Johnson)

King David High School has chosen to refund families who made a $1,000 deposit for next year but opted to send their kids to a different school. The decision ends a controversy that some parents said was a money grab.

Faced for the first time with more applicants than available positions, the school requested a non-refundable deposit of $1,000. Timing was a factor, as families were awaiting admission decisions from other private schools or space-limited specialty programs in the public system.

The idea, said KDHS head of school Russ Klein, was that families for whom King David was the first choice would pay and those for whom the school was not first choice might opt not to pay, thereby ensuring that those who most wanted in were admitted.

“It didn’t work out that way,” he said. “What we thought would happen, didn’t happen. They all just made the deposit.”

In the end, the school got what it wanted – full enrolment – and families ended up with their children in the schools of their choice.

After reflection on the process, Klein said, King David decided to refund the deposits to families who chose other schools.

“It wasn’t a cash grab,” he said. “We did it with good intentions.”

As it turned out, of the nine families offered the refund, four declined, choosing to make it a donation to the school, another donated half, two received the full refund and two others didn’t respond to the offer at all.

This year’s graduating class had 45 students, the second-largest ever. Next year’s class will be the biggest – between 55 and 60.

Klein said dealing with more applications than they have spots available was a learning opportunity.

“Now that we think we know how to handle this situation a little better, we’re hoping we get this, as we say, ‘good problem,’ where there are too many applicants again in the future,” he said. “The school next year will probably be at its biggest number ever.… We’ve just got nothing but good things to look forward to.”

Russ Klein recently marked his 10th year as head of school at King David High School. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Russ Klein resisted becoming King David High School’s head of school. Ten years ago, he was a vice-principal in the Vancouver school district, an 18-year veteran of the public system. One of his colleagues – Ben Lubinizki, a teacher at Prince of Wales, where Klein was VP – was a King David parent and on the search committee for a new head of school.

Klein was on track to become a principal in Vancouver and, besides, after attending Vancouver Talmud Torah, becoming bar mitzvah at Beth Israel and volunteering on kibbutzim as a young adult, he hadn’t had much to do with the Jewish community. But Lubinizki was persistent and encouraged Klein to just drop by the school and check it out.

“I saw what things were like,” Klein recalled. “I saw the potential. I also saw lots of things that I thought they needed a little bit of guidance on at that point.”

It turned out that the Vancouver School Board thought a time at King David could be a good experience for Klein before he became a principal, so offered him a two-year leave of absence.

“I thought it was going to be a temporary position,” he said. He is now celebrating his 10th year at the school and, as he reflects on the past decade, he says the move not only altered his career path, it changed his life.

A year into the two-year “temporary” gig, the VSB called with a principalship for him.

“I had to think hard about it because, in a little over a year, I had quite fallen in love with this particular place,” he told the Independent during an interview in his office at King David. “I loved everything about it, from its size to the people I was working with, to the mission that it had.”

But, while job security in the public system is assured, he said, “In the private system you don’t have any.”

The King David board offered him a 10-and-a-half year contract and Klein now hopes to retire – eventually – from a role he loves.

“I think it’s worked out quite well,” he said.

In May, at a major celebration, KDHS will celebrate 13 years – its bar mitzvah year – in the current purpose-built building. The school’s history dates back to 1986, when it was founded as Maimonides High School. It was called Vancouver Jewish High School in 2000/01, then Vancouver Talmud Torah High School until 2004, when it was renamed King David. It has always been a Grade 8 to 12 school.

As head of school for a decade, Klein has seen plenty of change.

Almost all Grade 8 students now travel to Israel on an 11-day experience, spending most of the time in the Galilee, Vancouver’s partnership region. Some of the kids in Har Vagai school – King David’s partner school there – live on Kibbutz Shamir, where Klein volunteered a couple of decades ago. In Grade 9, the Israeli students come to Vancouver.

In recent years, KDHS has changed its Grade 9 trip, which used to go to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to an alternative trip to Los Angeles, where students visit the Museum of Tolerance and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. The time difference – and the need to change planes – made the Washington trip difficult.

“We thought we could get more out of the trip,” said Klein. “L.A. is a much shorter, easier [trip], it’s less expensive. But it added another feature, which is that we have a shomer Shabbat weekend in Los Angeles.” (The trip didn’t happen this year as they are moving it to Grade 10.)

A group of King David students are also going to Guatemala to volunteer in a community where women and children from disadvantaged and often abusive backgrounds access support and skills.

In all these offerings, financial ability is never a factor in participation, Klein said.

In the classrooms, change also has been constant. New options have been added to electives, and the school has added advanced math and science programs as well as a Grade 10 outdoor experience program. King David students take all the core subjects public school students do, plus Judaics.

“In a typical Vancouver high school, most students will enrol in eight classes,” Klein explained. KDHS students take two more courses in various aspects of Jewish studies, including (in most cases) Hebrew language, Jewish history and “what we would call Jewish values: ethics, Torah, what does it mean to be Jewish?”

On top of an intense academic load, Klein said, “Our participation in athletics is outrageously high for a school of our size. Probably 70% of our kids are on one athletic team or another – or more.”

Challenges remain, Klein acknowledged. The school has pretty much met its student capacity and, while expansion seems unlikely in the near future, the redevelopment of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, a few steps west of the school, could present opportunities for a dedicated gym and shared use of space for classes, drama and music performances.

The changes in Klein’s career have been accompanied by changes in his personal life.

“As a person who didn’t have community, coming to a community that is so kind and caring has been absolutely amazing. It has been the best thing that could have happened from my point of view,” he said. “This has given meaning to my life, aside from the fact that, as a divorced person, I now have a very committed relationship with a former King David parent [Deborah Youngson] who is very traditional herself, which has brought more Jewish meaning to my life.”

Another change is also evident. He’s grown what he jokingly calls “the rabbinical beard,” which he says leads people to assume he is very wise.

“I do have a good chuckle every time I get an email that says ‘Dear Rabbi Russ.’”

King David High School has a wait pool for its Grade 8 program. (photo from facebook.com/kdhsvancouver)

King David High School has more applicants for Grade 8 this fall than they have spaces available, and some parents are upset with the way the school is handling the matter.

On Jan. 28, parents of 52 potential Grade 8 students received a message that their children had been accepted – and that $1,000 was required by Jan. 31 to confirm acceptance.

“The normal course is that King David and the independent and mini schools all release about the same time their acceptance letters,” said a parent whose child was accepted. “They’ll send out the first acceptance letters and then parents will either accept or not and then they’ll send out the second set a day or two later. That way they don’t really have a wait list and the process is relatively painless and takes place over a few days.”

The parent requested anonymity for fear that speaking out could affect their child’s future at the school and the Independent agreed to withhold the name.

“What King David has done suddenly is say we’re moving our process up about a month and to hold that spot now you need another thousand dollars, nonrefundable,” the parent said. The $1,000 deposit is on top of a $500 application fee, which increased this year from $100. Many families apply to more than one school, some of them independent and some of them Vancouver School Board specialty schools, such as mini schools, international baccalaureate or outdoor education programs. Those schools mostly send out acceptance letters in February.

“If they want to fundraise, that’s one thing,” said the parent. “But this seems to be a negative option fundraising scheme. They didn’t tell the families that they were going to do this when they applied originally and gave their deposit of $500. They didn’t tell them they were going to change the rules.”

But Russ Klein, King David’s head of school, said the intention was to alleviate stress for the families with children who are not among the 52 who received acceptance letters. He contests the idea that the $1,000 is to “hold the position.”

“We are not thinking of it as holding,” he said. “We’re thinking of it as accepting.”

He recognizes that many families hedge their bets by applying to several schools.

“They are frustrated, which I can understand, because they’re going to need to pay a deposit. That’s where they’re using the language ‘hold the spot.’ But we have families out there who are on our wait pool who are desperate to get into King David because they are not applying anywhere else. They are very frustrated at some of their peers who are holding spots that they don’t want,” said Klein. “We’re not their first choice. They’d rather get into another school and we don’t judge that. We’d just like the students who would like to be here to get the opportunity to be here.”

The school is using the term “wait pool” as opposed to “wait list” because it does not reflect an order.

“What schools are really trying to do is pick the best cohort for their group,” he said. “If, for example, a male student leaves and you’re trying to balance by gender, then we would try to get another male student in.” A wait pool implies that learning needs, particular talents and other factors that applicants bring to the cohort are weighed, rather than ranking applicants numerically.

Klein acknowledged that the process is new and has been difficult, because the school has never had so many applicants, a factor due simply to the coincidence of a population bubble in the community. Looking at this year’s Grade 6 classes at Jewish elementary schools and in the community, he said, King David expects far fewer Grade 8 applications next year. This year’s Grade 8 cohort has just 35 students.

“This is our first time through this type of challenge and we are learning a lot,” he said. The school has 26 regular Grade 8 positions and 26 accelerated positions, in which Grade 8 students complete Math 8, Science 8, Math 9 and Science 9 in a single year.

The school isn’t releasing exact numbers of how many students are in the wait pool, saying only that it is “more than 10.”

In all, the school now has well over 200 students, said Klein, and, while that presents growing pains, he hopes the demand indicates to the community that the school is successful, and said KDHS may seek to expand in the future.