MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Thirteen years ago, Katy Horowitz and her family moved from London to Miami, where she promptly secured a job at a charter school. But when the charter school abruptly decided to move an hour away, Horowitz decided to give her own school a shot: An unassuming little day care.
Horowitz said she never had plans for anything big. But “it snowballed.”
The day care began with five students in her home. Soon, it became a day care in a synagogue. The day care grew into a pre-school, Gan Katan Miami. Then the pre-school pulsed into Pardes Day School.
Nudged by parental demand, Horowitz and co-owner Sharon Eichberg have been adding a grade a year, and in August they welcomed their inaugural seventh-grade class.
Together, the two schools now serve 220 students. And Horowitz said she and Eichberg could serve twice as many if they could only find a suitable building in Miami Beach, where 90 percent of the students live.
“We’re always looking to see what’s out there,” she said. “But it’s either totally unaffordable. Or it’s not big enough. Or we can’t zone it.”
Gan Katan and Pardes Day School are typical examples of what’s happening with Jewish schools in Florida.
On the one hand: Accelerating growth.
On the other: Speed bumps, just ahead.
A new report from Teach Coalition and Step Up For Students sets the scene well.
Over the past 15 years, the report shows, the number of Jewish schools in Florida has nearly doubled, boosted by growing numbers of parents using state school choice scholarships, and bolstered by the migration of families from other states, particularly New York.
Between 2007-08 and 2022-23:
- the number of students enrolled in Jewish schools grew 58% to 13,379
- the number of Jewish days school and yeshivas grew from 40 to 74
- the percentage of students in Jewish schools using scholarships grew from 10 to 60%
All of this was before 2023-24, the year every student in Florida became eligible for choice scholarships.
Horowitz said she’s really never had time to stop and think about her school’s growth. “But every once in a while,” she said, “I get this moment of whoooosh, I can’t believe this is a thing.”
“Every year this school has evolved,” she continued. “It’s beautiful, but tiring. It’s this shapeshifting, ever-evolving craziness. I can’t explain. But somehow it always comes out right.”
The same could be said for the growth of Florida’s Jewish schools overall.
At the same time, though, the Teach Coalition and Step Up report makes clear that limits on growth are looming, due to restrictive zoning codes, rising real estate values, and increased competition with other private schools.
The vast majority of newer Jewish schools in Florida are on the smaller side, with fewer than 250 students. That’s not a function of parental preference, the report suggests, pointing to data showing robust growth in larger Jewish schools. Instead, the limitation seems to lie with restrictive local zoning laws.
“With Florida’s existing Jewish schools at or near full capacity, more effort is needed to source suitably sized school buildings,” said Danny Aqua, director of special projects at Teach Coalition, which advocates for Jewish schools. “Without legislative and regulatory action to reduce the hurdles to opening new schools, the lack of school building space may throttle growth in Florida’s Jewish day schools.”
Gan Katan and Pardes Day School were able to expand in 2021, when Horowitz and Eichberg lucked into two, long buildings that once housed a charter school. Prior to that, the buildings had been an apartment complex in a snug neighborhood graced by oaks and figs and bright splashes of hibiscus.
“It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” Horowitz said. “We called it our unicorn.”
The unicorn worked for a while, but it’s not ideal. The buildings now house the pre-school and elementary school, while the synagogue, less than a mile away, houses the sixth- and seventh-graders. Meanwhile, Horowitz and Eichberg can’t grow more space, but they have installed walls to create more rooms. Stacks of books and school supplies, including in Horowitz and Eichberg’s office, hammer home the reality that the school is maxing out.
“We thought the school was going to be small,” Eichberg said. “This,” she said, gesturing around the office, “was not the plan.”
Horowitz estimates 10 percent of the families they serve are recent transplants from out of state. Some from New York and California. Some from Israel and France. The biggest cluster came from Montreal.
Dayna Westreich and her family moved from Manhattan to Miami Beach in 2021. All four of her children attend Jewish schools using choice scholarships, two of them at Pardes Day School.
Florida just had more going for it, Westreich said – better cost of living, better quality of life, fewer headaches in the wake of the pandemic, and more economic opportunity. Choice scholarships were “an added bonus,” she said, and she was “over the moon” with Pardes.
“My daughter was instantly happy there, and it made the transition easier,” she said. “The school’s like a big hug.”
Florida was already hard to beat with good weather and a reputation as a safe haven, Horowitz said. Now that the scholarships are universal, it’s even more so.
Before last year, 25 to 50% of the students at Gan Katan and Pardes Day School were using the scholarships, she said. Now all of them are – and word is definitely getting around.
“When a group from a certain place finds a new place, they bring all their friends with them,” Horowitz said. “They send the carrier pigeons back home and say, ‘Come to Florida!’ “
