FALL/WINTER 2019
LEGACIES
The Gift of Language Skills a
“We recognized the Jewish community was growing, and that many kids were coming without English,” says Walder Morantz, whose children all attended Gray. “It was very important to us to do what we could to help them thrive.”
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While Gray’s dedicated team of EAL professionals made teaching English to new students their focus, Sheree Walder Morantz and Richard Morantz took it one step further and made it their mission to provide the school and its newcomers with the EAL resources they needed to succeed.
This commitment leads to student success. Just ask Ariel: in high school, he became a world-class debater and public speaker, an engaging orator with a masterful understanding of language and communication. He even competed in the World Individual Debating & Public Speaking Championships in Australia. Then, he completed a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics at the University of Winnipeg and a master’s in philosophy at the University of Toronto. Now, z nt ora he’s pursuing his PhD in philosophy as a M ard h McCracken Fellow at New York University, c i R where he has a full scholarship. eW a ld
Around the same time Ariel arrived, other Jewish students from South America, Israel, and the former Soviet Union did too. Soon, Spanish and Russian joined the cacophony of English and Hebrew already being spoken at Gray. These new students gained command of an entirely new vocabulary through the English as an Additional Language (EAL) program.
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It was understandable: the nine-year-old had just arrived with his family from Argentina and was thrust into a new learning environment. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he says. It’s a feeling that many newcomers experience.
Years later, the program has expanded its student support services thanks in large part to the Morantz/Walder family’s commitment to EAL: new materials have been purchased, including visual-graphic dictionaries, textbooks, and classroom materials. New student assessment procedures have been implemented, and all teachers have received EAL training from a specialized consultant.
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riel Melamedoff (’12) barely spoke English when he joined Gray Academy in May 2003.
“I’m extremely happy so many people use their time and energy to making the EAL program work,” says Ariel. “It is definitely one of the main reasons why I was able to find success at Gray and beyond.”•