Olivia Friedman is an innovative educational thinker who teaches at Ida Crown Jewish Academy (Skokie) and is a member of the Advisory Board of Jewish Educational Leadership. In this conversation she shares her thoughts about relationships with and engaging parents who have high school age children.

Elisa Marcus teaches Kindergarten at the Solomon Schechter of Manhattan. In this conversation with Jewish Educational Leadership she describes the culture in her school and articulates a vision of parent involvement in education alongside the relationship between parent and school/teacher.

SAR Academy in Riverdale, NY was the first Jewish day school in North America to shut down because of COVID-19. Almost immediately, a parent group partnered with the school to help coordinate what the distance learning would look like, and parents were heavily involved in planning the reopening of the school, with all the contingency plans, in Fall 2020. The parent group included a number of medical professionals, including Dr. Gita Lisker. Jewish Educational Leadership spoke with Dr. Lisker just prior to the opening of the Fall 2020 semester. Below is an edited and abridged transcript of that conversation.