Ten years after the Greenfield Hebrew Academy (GHA) and Yeshiva Atlanta (YA) merger, AJA High School\u2019s enrollment is approaching 100 students once again. After six years of a student body around 80 students large, AJA leaders hope that this year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. \u201cFor what used to be GHA and YA, what will this new thing be?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In particular, Mr. Rojek said that families worried about the school\u2019s religious identity. Often, he would hear, \u201c\u2018Oh, this means the school is moving to the right religiously\u2019 or \u2018this means the school is moving to the left religiously.\u2019\u201d 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 \u201ctheir own opinions, their own version of why this was happening or where the school was headed.\u201d Families\u2019 concerns or uncertainties about the school\u2019s direction led many to leave or not continue on to AJA High School from middle school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t change families\u2019 plans to send their children to GHA through 8th grade. However, it did diminish the high school\u2019s non-GHA population. \u201cIt was more difficult to pull people into the ninth grade of an ECD through 12th grade school,\u201d Ms. Sarif said. AJA High School was also not the \u201conly game in town,\u201d as YA had once been, especially as Yeshiva Ohr Yisrael (YOY) and Temima (two local Orthodox high schools) grew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though anticipated and logical, the drop in HS enrollment only happened two school years after the merger (2017-2018). This lag puzzled Mr. Rojek. \u201cWe got the reaction that we [expected],\u201d he said, \u201cbut it was delayed by two academic years, and that was a little mysterious.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cdidn\u2019t know YA as it was.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The drop in HS enrollment also coincided with the high school\u2019s move to GHA\u2019s 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 \u201ctumultuous time\u201d all around, with aftershock effects of the merger that did not occur until a few years after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following the move came six years of a stable high school population of around 80 students. Mr. Rojek said that with this stability, administrators\u2019 expectations for enrollment remained constant, although they hoped that \u201cthings would kick up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0With 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 \u201cthinking about AJA as AJA\u2026 as the ECD through 12th grade school that we are,\u201d and not \u201cthese two older institutions that at one point [joined] together.\u201d Ten years into the merger, Ms. Sarif said that new families \u201chave bought into the whole ECD through 12th grade school.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ms. Sarif and Mr. Rojek hope that AJA families are now enrolling in the school for the long run.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, due to a small current eighth grade class, Director of Admissions Ms. Sara Fisher worries that this year\u2019s rise was an anomaly. \u201cI was hoping it would be a trend,\u201d she said, but \u201cafter just one year, it’s hard to really say.\u201d Even so, the eighth grade retention rate for next year is expected to be above the historical 50%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cpipeline.\u201d Drops in a particular grade can result from various individual circumstances, according to Ms. Fisher, no longer just acclimation to AJA\u2019s ECD-12th grade model. Mr. Rojek added that demographic factors play a role, specifically the number of families in each grade \u201cthat want to have their students go to a dual curriculum Modern Orthodox High School.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" High School Enrollment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":2490,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"Graph by Oliver Mason","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","entry","rows"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/AJA-High-School-Enrollment.png?fit=600%2C371&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2491,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489\/revisions\/2491"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/palette.atljewishacademy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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