The Just Community.  It’s time to talk about it.  At a recent Town Hall, Evan Beller asked rhetorically whether underclassmen understood what the Just Community was. No one replied.

And while the school and administration are constantly working wonders for us in providing great courses, co-curriculars, Shabbatons, mishmars, international basketball tournaments, Krispy Kremes and great swag, the school’s revolutionary founding principle has been lost over the past two years spent at home. 

The Just Community – the model under which Dr. Jerry Friedman founded the school in 1992 – has students, teachers, and administrators side by side discussing, voting on, and forming policy matters. It is based on the principle that if students are making decisions, they will be more likely to follow rules which they create, and learn from mistakes of their governance along the way, and learn how to repair what doesn’t work.

It involves students being invited to participate in as many decisions as possible, so they have as much practice as possible in formulating and living under the consequences of their decisions.

It involves teachers, administrators and staff having full input – as we see them in discussions at all of our current “moral dilemma” Town Halls – and using their experience and the respect in which students hold them to guide the community toward good decisions and good outcomes. 

And it involves publicity, so that students know how to use the Fairness Committee to resolve disputes, fairly and fearlessly, with anyone on campus. 

But today, most students don’t even know what the founding Just Community is, or about the rights enshrined in its constitution, including the right of everyone in the community to fairness and to be heard. 

Incoming students are no longer educated on what the Agenda Committee does other than plan a Town Halls, or what the Fairness Committee does. Remote school last year has only made this worse, when older students had littlle opportunity to informally pass the culture down to newer ones.

Therefore underclassmen stand in oblivion at what this method of teaching really is and why the school uses the words “Just Community” so much. 

Here are some examples. Dr. Friedman’s Just Community would have students deciding the fate of Hashkama Minyan, a student-run minyan. Dr. Friedman’s Just Community would have students deciding on dress code measures. Dr. Friedman’s Just Community would have students be legislating and voting on policies that would address issues at school, like disruptions during davening or classroom messes.