Following the receipt of a $500,000 challenge grant, Oakland Hebrew Day School is well on the road toward building a new home in the hills.
Like the kids it serves, the 9-year-old day school has been experiencing a growth spurt.
In order to accommodate its 100-odd students in grades K through eight, the school has been forced to split in two — with elementary-age students at the original Ridgeway Avenue site near Piedmont Avenue, while middle-schoolers attend classes several miles away at Beth Jacob Congregation on Park Boulevard and the adjacent East Bay Alliance Church.
Clearly, the school is bursting at the britches. Thankfully, however, its relocation plans have hit the home stretch.
After a two-year search throughout the East Bay for a new home, in June and September of last year the school purchased adjoining tracts of land on Oakland’s Redwood Road, near Merritt College and the Chabot Space and Science Center. In the long months since, the school has cleared just about all of the city’s permit hurdles and — thanks in part to an anonymous $500,000 challenge grant — has almost all the funds it requires to get the shovels into the ground.
“Frankly, thank God, we’ve experienced some tremendous growth the past couple of years and we’ve really outgrown our current site,” said Rabbi Elie Tuchman, the school’s director. “This site took us a long time to find; we really need this site for future growth. We’re kind of assuming that, at some point, we’ll grow to two classes per grade, all the way up to the eighth. That would be a max of somewhere in the 200s.”
The half-million dollar challenge grant was the largest gift so far in the school’s fund-raising campaign, but, according to capital campaign chair Jerry Yanowitz, there have been many generous donations.
“We’ve probably received 10 gifts of over $100,000. And not one of the people giving those gifts has asked for a naming opportunity, which is pretty incredible,” said Yanowitz, who is the parent of an OHDS fourth-grader. “The people who have given are very committed to Jewish education and are not particularly concerned about getting their names put on a classroom or the library. They’ve been doing what they can to get the school to the next level.”
The modern Orthodox day school obtained two buildings on the Redwood Road site, paying roughly $1.25 million in cash for the one that it aims to convert into the school building and taking out a mortgage on the other.
In what school officials have dubbed “phase one” of the project, OHDS hopes to demolish the first building and replace it with a 27,000-square-foot school complete with 14 large classrooms, a library, a Beit Midrash text study room, computer and science labs, an art and music room, a multipurpose room, a kitchen, offices and administrative spaces.
The construction costs are estimated at $4.5 million. Yanowitz says the school has $3 million pledged and he hopes to line up the remainder within 30 days and get the project started within 90 days.
Tenants in the second building obtained by the school have leases running potentially as late as 2012 — but they might vacate the premises well before then. In the project’s second phase, the school aims to eventually tear down all or part of that building and replace it with open space or perhaps erect a gymnasium.
All told, both phases figure to cost around $7.5 million. School officials hope to move into their new digs by September 2003.
The Redwood Road location, in the Oakland hills, is not close to the school’s current sites in more central neighborhoods. School officials point out, however, that busing has been an effective solution for Tehiyah Day School, which began in Kensington in 1979 and later relocated to the El Cerrito hills. What’s more, they say, the Oakland hills location could be attractive to students from adjacent suburbs.
“It’s a plus, because it really does open our school up to other parts of, say, eastern Alameda County out by Livermore and Pleasanton, and Contra Costa County as well,” said Steven Bovarnick, an OHDS board member, site committee chair and parent of a third-grader.
“It’s ideally located to provide an educational alternative to the people who live a little further south. Plus, the site is on top of a hill, it’s got an entire bay view, abundant outdoor space and adjacent regional parks, an equestrian center, an archery range…everything goes on up there. We really are just as excited as we can be.”