By: Dr. Susan Holzman, Lower School Principal, Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School
“Your students are so nice!”
That’s what Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School principals and faculty members hear time and again from their colleagues at other schools about the BT students. That kind of niceness is the result of Beth Tfiloh’s mission to grow Jewish citizens who are ready to face the world with poise, knowledge, and humanity.
Our students can trace the roots of this education back to lessons they learned in BT’s PreSchool and Lower School. BT’s Lower School places the highest importance on imbuing classrooms with a spirit of derech eretz — the code of proper behavior that binds us to each other as human beings and as Jews.
Derech eretz permeates every aspect of life in the Lower School. At the start of the school year, each class works together to create essential agreements for how the members of their small community will treat each other. These classroom rules are then combined and distilled into a set of Lower School guiding rules for the year.
