After a recent site visit to the Eilat learning center, AMIT Director General Dr. Amnon Eldar, accompanied by AMIT’s Limor Friedman, provided the following update:
We were impressed with the progress they have made since our initial visit there only a few weeks ago. The government built an educational campus for our students. Now 270 students, both religious and secular, come daily, and one of the religious elementary schools is right next door. Real learning is taking place in a variety of subjects and each classroom we visited was full. Students are currently studying the following subjects: math, English, history, Bible, literature, and Hebrew grammar.
In addition to the classic classrooms, we also saw a Maker’s class. AMIT provides a Maker’s professional down to Eilat once a week with a “Makerspace on Wheels” to give our evacuated Sderot students this type of experience as well. There are also special pre-Bagrut marathons in preparation for the winter Bagrut exams because these students lost so much time and missed so much material since the beginning of the war.
Most importantly, we saw happy teens. Students were learning regularly, smiling, laughing, interacting – there is normalcy within the chaos.
The teachers spoke about the challenges they face – they have no secretarial help, admin team, etc., and they are literally running the school from A to Z. Yet despite all these challenges, the team was upbeat, enthusiastic, passionate, and proud of their work. This is their service to Am Yisrael and everyone we interacted with spoke about their great sense of mission in being there with our students. After the learning center, we went to visit Ulpanat Bnei Akiva in Eilat, where 30 of our students are currently enrolled. These middle school students have their own classes and teachers and overlap with the rest of the school.
From there, we headed to a major Resilience Center that was set up for the evacuees. They have every type of therapy you can imagine, and many different activities and opportunities. Tzaharon, who previously ran AMIT’s northern regional community, is running the entire AMIT operation in Eilat and doing truly amazing work. He leaves his family all week, every week, to make sure that he is there for our students. Tzaharon takes students to this Resilience Center for various programs, activities, and therapies.
Despite the amazing accomplishments and successes, there are many challenges facing us. First, there is a lot of movement among the evacuees, they are very transient. Families can decide to leave Eilat at any point, they can move to the Dead Sea or other areas, and vice versa. We work hard to stay on top of all their movements.
Also, there are still a significant number of kids who are reluctant to take part in any type of formal activities, either because the parents refuse to let their kids leave their side, or because the students themselves are experiencing anxiety. There are also many familial issues and challenges that have come up – parents have lost their sense of authority, they don’t want to force their kids to do anything right now, etc. Specifically for these kids, AMIT is working closely with an organization called Sultana, established by the Municipality. They have young mentors and staff members who frequent the hotels, boardwalks, and beaches, to build relationships with these teens, and then slowly help encourage them to continue to go to school.
It was amazing to see that we can provide for these youth who went through such trauma and are now living in such a complicated reality, so many varied and professional opportunities to improve their personal well-being and academic growth.
We are all grateful to our incredible AMIT educational staff for going way beyond and way above in helping our students throughout this crisis.
