Welcome to Your New School: A New Home for Dror Israel’s Social High School in Tel Aviv

This September marks an exciting new beginning for Dror Israel’s Social High School in Tel Aviv: students are starting the school year in a new school building.

Until now, the school operated from a temporary rented location, where limited space constrained both the number of students it could accommodate and its ability to develop the facilities needed to support its full range of educational initiatives.

A new building means a new space to learn, create, and grow.

The need for a real home for the school was clear.

Through a collaboration with the Tel Aviv Municipality, the school now has a new building that can better support its students, educators, and educational approach, while creating new possibilities for the school to grow.

In the lead-up to the school year, educators, students, and members of the school community worked together to prepare the building. The students even picked up paintbrushes and helped paint their new school. It was a fitting beginning for a school built around the idea that young people should not simply be participants in their education, but active partners in shaping the world around them/

The Tel Aviv Social High School is one of nine high schools in the Dror Educational Centers network. Its approach combines social pedagogy with interdisciplinary, project based learning, connecting students’ education to their community and to real life.

Students can pursue vocational studies in eco urban agriculture, sound and music production, and social communications alongside their regular studies. The new school includes opportunities for hands-on learning, from a rooftop garden to spaces supporting sound production and creative work.

Students helped paint and prepare their new building in Tel Aviv ahead of the school year.

Students have already shown what this kind of education can produce. Last year, students in the social communications track won third place in the national Young Creators Competition at Tel Aviv’s Solidarity Film Festival for their documentary Guardian of the Walls.

For a school where learning is rooted in relationships, collaboration, creativity, and responsibility, having the right physical space matters.

And this year, before the students began learning inside their new school, they helped build it together.

After years in a temporary location, the Tel Aviv Social High School finally has a place where its community can put down roots and look toward the future.