Ilana Ruskay-Kidd

“As a young professional I became passionate about coming to know children as they are and saw schools as places that could bring out the best in children and help pave pathways otherwise unavailable. The creation of The Shefa School has provided me the opportunity to combine my deep sense of education as social action and schools as nurturing places with my deep love and connection to Jewish life and living. Building The Shefa School is a calling for me, a way for me to express my full self, and as the school’s name shefa (abundance) implies, to honor my profound belief that all children are created betzelem elohim, in the image of God.”

Ilana Ruskay-Kidd is the Founder and Head of The Shefa School (Shefa), a pluralistic Jewish community day school that offers support and individualized learning to students with language-based learning disabilities. As Head of School, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd hires and supervises all faculty and manages all aspects of the school’s strategic planning and day-to-day functioning. Ms. Ruskay-Kidd works with the Board and other stakeholders to make key decisions about Shefa’s program, culture, and expansion. Additionally, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd oversees Shefa’s admissions process, curriculum, and staff development.

In the two years since founding Shefa, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd has created a nurturing, diverse, and mission-driven learning environment, which continues to expand and will eventually serve students in grades K-12. In addition to facilitating the educational achievements of Shefa students (including significant progress in written and oral communication proficiency), Ms. Ruskay-Kidd and her team work to advocate for more effective support of learning-disabled children within the Jewish Day School field, visiting day schools in the Tri-State Area and convening regular day school collaboration meetings at Shefa. To date, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd and the Shefa team have engaged 150 professionals from over 40 day schools.

From 2006-2013, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd served as Director of the Saul and Carole Zabar Nursery School and as Director of the Center for Children and Families at the JCC Manhattan. In these roles, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd worked to envision and cultivate a school that understood the developmental and social-emotional needs of students, had Jewish values embedded into its very core, and fostered important community ties for both students and families. Prior to this, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd held other positions at JCC Manhattan, serving as Senior Director of Family Life and Volunteer Programs from 2003-2006 and as Director of Young Family Programs from 2001-2003. In these roles, Ms. Ruskay-Kidd expanded both the Young Families Department and the Family Life Program into robust departments serving hundreds of families and helped launch Adaptations, a program for young adults with disabilities.

Ms. Ruskay-Kidd earned her B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University (1995) and an M.S.Ed. in Elementary and Early Childhood Education from Bank Street College of Education (1996) where she received an Iscol Scholarship for Inner-City Education.