Diversity remains a perennial goal for Levine Academy - not just in family profile, but also in our curricular goals, our respect for different perspectives, our ceremonies and gatherings, and in our approach to community service and spirituality. Curriculum and Programming: Following the 2015 Strategic Plan, and then again solidified in the 2019 Strategic Plan, Levine’s programming and curriculum became much more global and diverse in content. The Social Studies curriculum, K thru 8, has been revamped to incorporate studies from all continents - geography, culture, people, history, and habitat. We have expanded our language arts reading offerings and have created new libraries within each classroom with a full range of books, including biographies, fiction, non-fiction, sports, nature, and much more with a greater representation of cultures around the world and minority profiles. Even within our standard studies of Israel, we are now teaching a new curriculum to our 8 th Grade students about contemporary Israel, covering its multicultural profile today, its diversity of societal and business features, and the contemporary controversies governing Israel’s relationships with its neighbors. The curriculum is entitled, “Israel - It’s Complicated.” In our electives program in the Middle School, we have included languages outside Hebrew for the first time during the 2019- 2020 school year. We taught a trimester of Chinese in that year. During the 2020-2021 school year, Levine launched its first Spanish class for both 7 th and 8 th Grade students, who can select this class among the elective offerings. Our programming - annual ceremonies; national holiday programs; our Friday morning community-wide Shabbat programs, for example - have embraced a much more diverse approach, as we have brought in special guests to speak on behalf of their different cultures and upbringings. We have included Asian-American K-Pop singers; African-American ministers and rabbis; and speakers from many different social service non-profit agencies to talk about programs that our Student Congress is supporting in its monthly fund-raising efforts. The Levine community has established partnerships with several significant agencies and institutions with high impact in the Dallas metroplex: Levine began an annual partnership with UT Dallas to leverage that school’s graduate engineering and computer science programs to work as co-instructors in our Educare and After School Programs. Our UTD connections went further during 2019-2020, as our girls joined with girls from numerous public and private schools in UTD’s Innovate(her) Program, which is designed to inspire young girls to pursue careers in engineering, computers, and science. Our Middle School students devote a day at Jewish Family Service in a program that teaches about poverty and to experience how families with limited means must apportion their dollars carefully to sustain themselves. Another growing partnership is taking place between Levine Academy and the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Instructors and docents at the Holocaust Museum have been meeting with our teachers, and also our students, in an effort to construct appropriate learning relevant to Holocaust studies for Middle School students.
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