Twenty-five years ago, eight children and their parents pressed their palms into the wet cement outside their very own, brand-new preschool.
Leslee Lauritzen’s little handprint isn’t there anymore, but she is — and she’s making a different kind of mark on Petaluma’s Gan Israel.
The students — including Samantha, her 3-year-old daughter — call her “Teacher Leslee.”
A member of the first class, whose parents helped build and teach in the then-cooperatively run preschool, Lauritzen now teaches at Gan Israel, which will commemorate its silver anniversary this fall.
Unlike many others, Samantha isn’t terribly interested in the anniversary. As soon as she picked up the phone to talk with this reporter, she was instead intent on explaining that her favorite thing to do at school is play hide-and-seek and dig in the sandbox.
With Spanish, French and Hebrew lessons, a new gymnastics program and everything in between, the children don’t have time to spend all day hiding and seeking.
Family involvement and volunteerism is responsible for Gan Israel’s creation and survival over the years, says co-founder and board member, Shelly Bauer. When the school couldn’t afford teacher assistants or when money needed to be raised, it was the parents who stepped in to help. “We constantly did fund-raisers, we didn’t just rely on tuition,” adds Linda Baraz, Lauritzin’s mother.
Bauer hopes the anniversary dinner celebration this fall will revitalize community involvement in the school and bring in new, needed enrollment, because Gan Israel is in some financial difficulty.
Lauritzen says that since 9/11 the lull in the economy has hurt Petaluma families, especially those in computer technology. As Bauer puts it: “With recent layoffs, the preschool goes first.”
But she isn’t worried. Twenty students have already enrolled in next year’s two classes, up from last year’s 16, and she is working on expanding further. Previous years had as many as 36.
It seems unlikely that these three women will let their “baby” fall short of their greatest expectations.
In 1978, there was no Jewish preschool “north of the Golden Gate Bridge,” says Baraz, so she and a group of friends decided they should start one. “It was important for our children to feel proud of what they are, and not to feel uncomfortable right from the get-go.”
The tight-knit group hand-sewed a carpet, built a climbing structure, sandbox, patio and tables under the direction of parent Michael Bauer. They baked cookies and set up a tree in Petaluma’s Congregation B’nai Israel that had photos of needed supplies hanging from its branches.
Congregants could “pick” a photo of the storybook “Good Night Moon,” for example, or a box of crayons, or bottles of paint and pay for it. They developed a Jewish-based curriculum with the help of Rabbi David Kopstein, and once completed they volunteered weekly to help teach.
Baraz, now on the school board, says, “It’s still going…it’s like the little Energizer bunny.”
“When you’re working on a project like that, you become very close,” says co-founder and Gan Israel’s first teacher, Judy Lutsky.
Former teacher Lori Cleveland remembers “the potluckers,” a group of parents who had regular potlucks, but more importantly, took care of each other when they were sick. This benevolence extended to Cleveland when she was pregnant. “It was a tremendous sense of family there,” she says.
Lauritzen says that other than removing the 1970s-style light brownish, red and blue square carpeting and revamping the curriculum, “not that much has changed.” The classes are still small enough so “families get to know each other…and we get to spend time with the kids so that it’s not a day care but a preschool.”
Lauritzen still remembers her teacher, Judy Lutsky. “I just remember her mannerisms, the way she talked to us. She was very nurturing — you could sit in her lap, she was made to teach children.”
Classmate Jeff Bauer says that when he walked in on the first day of school at Gan Israel’s 1978 class, he wanted to walk right back out. But Lutsky calmed his fears. Wondering how she did it, he says, “she somehow kept us entertained.”
Lutsky remembers the early years at Gan Israel as “a really exciting time, because there was a new rabbi, and he came with a lot of new ideas, so there was an influx in the community.”
As Baraz watched her granddaughter Samantha sing off-key during this year’s graduation ceremony at a school that she helped build, where her daughter now teaches and was once enrolled, she couldn’t help holding back her tears. “We are very protective of it,” she says.
It is easy to see why.