FAQ

JLA is not just another Jewish Day School. Its focus is exclusively on exceptional students with the greatest potential for leadership and academic achievement. It is also centrally located within short commuting distance from all of Miami’s Jewish population centers, including Aventura, South Miami and Miami Beach.

Admissions to JLA is limited to 45 students per grade. Selections are made based on student character, ambition, and drive. In addition, all students have to demonstrate the ability to succeed in an educational program where all courses are taught at an Honors level or above. Knowledge of Hebrew and Judaic Studies is not a prerequisite for admission.

JLA is a need-blind institution (where a student’s ability to pay is not considered during the admission process), and utilizes a fully indexed tuition model where families pay what they can afford. Full tuition is on par with the Miami area’s top private schools, but additional tuition levels exist for families for whom full tuition is out of reach. All program costs, including JLA Ba’Aretz, its service trips, and daily food service, is included in tuition. JLA is deeply committed to educating mission appropriate students regardless of their ability to pay.

In order to foster independence of thought and a love for learning, student agency (choice of classes, choice of research areas, opportunities for student expression, etc.) is a hallmark of JLA’s educational program. Additionally, course curricula favors depth over breadth with an emphasis on building each student’s capacity for critical and creative thinking rather than rote memorization and spit-back. Where appropriate, courses are project or inquiry based, allowing student questions and real-world problem solving to drive the course of study.

Yes. Every student learns conversational Hebrew through the school’s JLA Ba’Aretz and Ulpan programs. A multi-year Spanish program is also available for those students who want it as well.

Helping students develop healthy bodies in addition to healthy minds  is a core feature of JLA’s program. Therefore students have daily physical conditioning in the school’s indoor gym and fitness center, outdoor track, tennis, basketball, and futsal courts. In addition, JLA fields competitive after-school teams for both boys and girls in soccer, basketball, volleyball, tennis, cross country, and golf. 

All students in grades 9 through 12 spend the first 3.5 weeks of school every year studying Hebrew, Jewish History, Tanach, and contemporary Israel in an immersive, real world setting at the AMHSI-JNF campus in Hod Hasharon, Israel. This annual study abroad experience does not only serve as a catalyst for student bonding with each other and with the State of Israel, but allows for a greater focus on the school’s General Studies curriculum throughout the remainder of the year. Grades 6, 7, and 8 spend those first weeks on campus in their own immersive program which combines community building activities and an orientation to school life with an intensive dive into executive function and study skills for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. 

Students whose mother is Jewish or who have had an Orthodox conversion, regardless of current affiliation, observance or prior knowledge  are welcome at JLA. For the purposes of kashrut, tefillah, and other areas of Jewish law, JLA operates in accordance with a Modern Orthodox approach. As a proudly Zionist institution, JLA fosters a love for Israel in its students while helping them to understand the complexities and nuance of its history and continued survival. The school also aims to instill a strong connection to Judaism in all of its students. With morning prayer and one daily Judaic period in addition to Ulpan and the annual JLA Ba’Aretz program, the JLA  Judaic program more closely resembles that of a Jewish Community School than that of a Yeshiva Day School.

Yes. A generous gift from the Ades family has helped purchase the school’s site and construct a state-of-the-art campus. The Ades family is still looking, however, for potential partners who share the vision for the project. Our founders are also committed to offsetting the operational deficit created by the school’s indexed tuition model for the school’s first several years. The plan is to raise a significant endowment funded by the school’s community to ensure that the school’s indexed tuition program is sustainable over the long term.

Following in the footsteps of many of the top high schools across the country, we made a very intentional pedagogical decision early on that we were not going to adopt the AP curriculum.  AP courses tend to emphasize breadth over depth, they don’t allow any flexibility for following student interest, and the level of the content is usually well below that of a typical freshman course at a selective university. 

In addition to the lack of rigor, not all AP courses receive credit from selective colleges. For example, a student interested in pre-med could excel in AP biology, AP chemistry and AP physics, yet they will be required to take all three of these courses at a college level. Their AP scores will not guarantee them placement out of these core courses for pre-med college students. We therefore believe our students are better served by creating our own college level courses (we call them “advanced”) that will both challenge them and engage them in ways the AP curriculum can’t.

If you would like to know more about why JLA has intentionally excluded AP courses from our curriculum, see our AP FAQ.