High School Enrollment
Ten years after the Greenfield Hebrew Academy (GHA) and Yeshiva Atlanta (YA) merger, AJA High School’s enrollment is approaching 100 students once again. After six years of a student body around 80 students large, AJA leaders hope that this year’s roughly 20% rise in enrollment is a sign that the high school has overcome the challenges of transitioning from the formerly standalone Yeshiva Atlanta to the culmination of an early childhood through 12th grade institution. The question remains if this increase will hold.
The drop in High School enrollment after the GHA-YA merger was not a surprise, according to Mr. Joel Rojek, an administrator on the YA side at the time and current High School General Studies Principal. He said he understands how families wanted to give the school space to adjust to the change that the merger brought. Families were unsure what the change would mean, he said. “For what used to be GHA and YA, what will this new thing be?”
In particular, Mr. Rojek said that families worried about the school’s religious identity. Often, he would hear, “‘Oh, this means the school is moving to the right religiously’ or ‘this means the school is moving to the left religiously.’” And although he believed that the new AJA mission and vision statement did not indicate such shifts, the merger created space for people to form “their own opinions, their own version of why this was happening or where the school was headed.” Families’ concerns or uncertainties about the school’s direction led many to leave or not continue on to AJA High School from middle school.
Ms. Franeen Sarif, a GHA administrator during the merger and current Executive Director, pointed to an additional cause of high school enrollment decline. The high school continued to take around 50% of middle school graduates, just as YA had from GHA students. The merger didn’t change families’ plans to send their children to GHA through 8th grade. However, it did diminish the high school’s non-GHA population. “It was more difficult to pull people into the ninth grade of an ECD through 12th grade school,” Ms. Sarif said. AJA High School was also not the “only game in town,” as YA had once been, especially as Yeshiva Ohr Yisrael (YOY) and Temima (two local Orthodox high schools) grew.
Though anticipated and logical, the drop in HS enrollment only happened two school years after the merger (2017-2018). This lag puzzled Mr. Rojek. “We got the reaction that we [expected],” he said, “but it was delayed by two academic years, and that was a little mysterious.”
Ms. Sarif offered one explanation. As the years passed since the 2014 merger, the high school comprised more grades that enrolled post-merger, grades that “didn’t know YA as it was.” After the larger grades whose high school careers were divided between YA and AJA graduated, the incoming 9th grade classes would have been smaller due to the merger. AJA High School graduated 20 seniors in 2017 and only took in 11 of the 24 eighth graders for the 2017-2018 school year.
The drop in HS enrollment also coincided with the high school’s move to GHA’s Sandy Springs campus in 2018 and the transfer of school leadership from interim Rabbi Pinchos Hecht to Rabbi Ari Leubitz. Ms. Sarif described it as a “tumultuous time” all around, with aftershock effects of the merger that did not occur until a few years after.
Despite a decline in enrollment, community stakeholders and administrators still hoped for an increase and designed the new high school building with that in mind. Mr. Rojek said that they planned for the building to house 125 students comfortably.
Following the move came six years of a stable high school population of around 80 students. Mr. Rojek said that with this stability, administrators’ expectations for enrollment remained constant, although they hoped that “things would kick up.”
With a higher middle to high school retention rate for the current freshmen, Ms. Sarif and Mr. Rojek hope that AJA families are now enrolling in the school for the long run. Mr. Rojek posits that parents are now “thinking about AJA as AJA… as the ECD through 12th grade school that we are,” and not “these two older institutions that at one point [joined] together.” Ten years into the merger, Ms. Sarif said that new families “have bought into the whole ECD through 12th grade school.”
Ms. Sarif and Mr. Rojek hope that AJA families are now enrolling in the school for the long run.
AJA High School has adjusted to a larger student body this year. The freshmen population created a need for additional classes, like two tracks of boys honors Chumash for ninth and tenth grade. Additionally, more students participated in athletics, joining historically smaller sports teams such as tennis and wrestling, and a boys soccer team joined the spring sports offerings. More students also played for teams like boys flag football, basketball, and baseball as well as girls volleyball and soccer.
Nevertheless, due to a small current eighth grade class, Director of Admissions Ms. Sara Fisher worries that this year’s rise was an anomaly. “I was hoping it would be a trend,” she said, but “after just one year, it’s hard to really say.” Even so, the eighth grade retention rate for next year is expected to be above the historical 50%.
At this point in AJA history, Ms. Sarif said that fluctuations in class size result from factors and events throughout the ECD, elementary, and middle school as grades move through the AJA “pipeline.” Drops in a particular grade can result from various individual circumstances, according to Ms. Fisher, no longer just acclimation to AJA’s ECD-12th grade model. Mr. Rojek added that demographic factors play a role, specifically the number of families in each grade “that want to have their students go to a dual curriculum Modern Orthodox High School.” For the current freshmen, this amount was 32, but that does not guarantee that all grades will meet that size moving forward. Based upon lower school class sizes, however, Ms. Sarif said that the future of HS enrollment is promising.
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