By Helga Abraham
“When I first came here,” recounts Eti Zabary, the bubbly 54-year-old principal of AMIT Kennedy junior and senior high school in Acco, “I found broken chairs and tables, black-stained floors, rooms with no windows and pools of rain in classrooms and corridors.” This was in 2013. Within a couple of years, Zabary succeeded in transforming the run-down premises into an attractive educational institution that is fast gaining recognition in the Western Galilee. As she shows me round the school, she is clearly proud of her achievements, pointing to a former garbage dump now transformed into a pretty courtyard with plants and decorative pots, brightly painted classrooms, curvy green tables that can be used individually or joined together for group work, and attractive work-stands equipped with computers. There is also new flooring, air conditioning, and a large wall-to-wall carpeted music room.
How did she do it? “As soon as I arrived, I began fundraising. I introduced many new educational projects, and each project brought in new funding. Within a year I had a proper working budget.” Most important, Zabary succeeded in raising the school’s academic achievements from the nadir to the heights. In 2013, the school had no more than a 57% Bagrut (high school certificate) achievement level; by 2015, the figure had shot up to 88%. “AMIT Acco is now among the top schools in Israel for academic achievement,” says Zabary proudly.
Ironically, Zabary never aspired to be a teacher. She studied biology and wanted to do research but, she admits, teaching was in her DNA. “My mother was a teacher and teaching came naturally to me. When I was a little girl, I used to line my siblings up in a row and teach them whatever came out of my head.” She fell into education soon after gaining her BA when a religious boys’ high school close to where she lived, Yavne Haifa, asked her to teach a biology class. Just 23 years old and already a young mother, she was put in charge of large classes of 15 year-old boys. She sailed through. “I was never afraid of a class and never had disciplinary problems,” she says. “I always knew how to set boundaries and was never forced to punish anyone.”
While Zabary’s science classes kept getting larger and larger, the other classes at Yavne Haifa were losing students. The school officials considered appointing Zabary as principal but the suggestion was rejected by the Israeli Ministry of Education, which refused to approve a woman as principal of a religious boys’ school. “At that point, I realized,” says Zabary, “that I no longer had a future at the school and that I wanted to run my own school level, and by the time I left this figure had risen to 70%. We also increased the school population from 300 to 700.”
At this point, Zahalon Siri, then coordinator of AMIT’s school principals, interviewed Zabary and offered her the post of principal at AMIT Kennedy Junior and Sin Acco.
On taking up the reins at AMIT Kennedy, a junior and senior high school with separate boys’ and girls’ wings, Zabary completely revamped the curriculum, introduced new tracks (computer science, physics, communications, information technology), appointed new teachers and created myriad new projects. Close to her heart is the PBL (Project Based Learning) program, which encourages students to be actively engaged in the learning process. “PBL merges knowledge and skills,” explains Zabary. “Students research a subject, write up programs, build products and present their projects in front of teachers and students.”
For their PBL physics project, last year, seventh-graders Noga Ben Shoshan, Sarah Amar and Lior Yaakov built structures aimed at enabling them to learn about materials, construction, insulation and conductivity. Noga built a kennel with a yard, fence, lawn and fountains, while Lior and Sarah built houses equipped with hot-cold water pipes and electrical conduits. “It was great fun,” says Sarah. “Instead of just listening to the teacher and writing notes, we built something and learned from the experience of building.”
Another pet project of Zabary’s is the program of elective courses. “My dream,” she says, “is to enable every child from the periphery to study whatever subject he or she loves…irrespective of the school curriculum. I want to teach young people to dream and expose them to as many domains as possible.” Thus, during regular school hours, the students at AMIT Kennedy can follow two two-hour courses from four domains: sport (sailing, biking, martial arts, basketball or soccer), arts (musical instruments, zumba, painting, cookery), science (medicine, advanced physics, hothouse planting, robotics, recycling) and academia (law, finance, sociology, debating, or Torah).
Not surprising, Zabary is hugely popular among the students. Eleventh-graders Ofek Amran and David Menahem were among the large group of boys that followed Zabary to Acco from Kfar Hasidim and from Yavne Haifa. Both say the move was worthwhile because the school offers them a high standard of learning, and they still have Zabary as principal. “She is very professional,” says David, “and she also listens to us.”
The school’s staff are also enamored of their principal. English teacher Ariel Freedman, originally from Los Angeles, appreciates the professionalism he has found at AMIT Kennedy: “Eti is a great principal; she is always looking for new ways to develop the school and raise standards.” Veteran teacher Michal Raviv for her part notes that Zabary is in a league of her own: “I worked with many principals who had no vision, dreams or passion. Eti has vision, enthusiasm and faith, and she understands that her strength lies in her staff and does her best to support them.”
Zabary is proud of the new atmosphere of success that permeates AMIT Kennedy: “Seeing the spark in the eyes of my staff and my students makes it all worthwhile.”
