This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.

From kindergarten through eighth grade, I walked 10 minutes down Columbus Avenue every day to 100th street and through the glass doors of my Jewish day school, where we would begin each day with prayer. By the time Schechter Manhattan, an Upper West Side school associated with the Conservative movement, shuttered its doors last year, I was already a sophomore at a public high school in Battery Park.

At Schechter, I was culturally enveloped by Jewishness. Each day we studied modern Hebrew and we learned about topics like the Hebrew Bible and Jewish history. Schechter gave me a strong and valuable bedrock of Jewish thought, practice, history, and culture. My friends who are attending Jewish high schools have a deeper familiarity with Jewish practice and theology, and will have greater literacy in our shared culture.

And yet, while I miss the security afforded by that environment, I’ve come to realize that I’m better off not learning in a Jewish-only setting.

At my heterogeneous public school, where I’ll begin my senior year on Thursday, I am able to learn from and engage with a population that is diverse and varied in experiences and opinions.........

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