Board: Florida Charter School Can Teach Hebrew

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A charter school may resume teaching in Hebrew, three weeks after the lessons were halted over concerns the Jewish faith was seeping into public classrooms, the school board voted yesterday.

Broward County board members said close monitoring of the country's first Hebrew-language charter school is still necessary, but that its administrators had cleared up major concerns.

The school district will work with the Ben Gamla Charter School in Hollywood to create training programs for teachers and board members to ensure the separation of church and state, Schools Superintendent James Notter. Lesson plans will be submitted monthly for district review. "We have asked this charter school to do a lot of different things," the board chairwoman, Beverly Gallagher, said. "As far as I can see, they have done everything that we have asked them." The school can teach about the Jewish faith, but cannot advocate it. Hebrew instruction is to resume Monday.

"We never considered crossing that line," the school's founder, Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic congressman, said. Ben Gamla's roughly 400 students in kindergarten through eighth grades take a Hebrew language course.