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Mostly Cloudy Rookie Billet to Bnot Shulamith; new high school in '11
By Mayer Fertig
Issue of March 26, 2010/ 11 Nissan 5770One of the Five Towns’ best-known and well-regarded educators is joining Bnot Shulamith of Long Island. Rookie Billet, who currently heads Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls in Teaneck, will become principal of the Bnot Shulamith middle school in August. She will also commence planning to be the founding dean of the Bnot Shulamith High School, now expected to open in 2011 with a ninth grade.
The new principal is a Shulamith graduate who attended the school from kindergarten through eighth grade during its years in Borough Park.
She plans to “bring the eternal values of Shulamith to the forefront of the educational program,” Mrs. Billet said in a telephone interview this week.
“I definitely developed my lifelong love of the Hebrew language in Shulamith; the foundation of my skills in reading meforshim [commentaries] and Torah study; and friendships that I still have until today,” she said.
“Mrs. Billet embodies Shulamith’s ideals of a love for Torah, Eretz Yisrael, Am Yisrael and of valuing both Jewish and secular learning,” said Shlomo Wilamowsky, a member of the Shulamith board who was instrumental in bringing Mrs. Billet to Shulamith. “But more importantly, she has the education, experience and background that will allow her to successfully impart those ideals to our daughters.”
“After having spent many years in high school education I feel that I have a strong sense of what middle school ought to be doing to prepare students for the best possible achievement,” Mrs. Billet told The Jewish Star.
Mrs. Billet is also widely known as Rebbetzin Billet of the Young Israel of Woodmere, where her husband, Rabbi Herschel Billet, has been the rav for 30 years. She is a graduate of Brooklyn College and of Yeshiva University’s Teacher’s Institute for Women, where she earned an additional bachelor’s degree and a Hebrew Teacher’s diploma. She also holds a Master’s in Sociology from New York University and additional credentials earned in Israel at Michlalah and Hebrew University.
“I want to give students a general Jewish knowledge and general secular knowledge that prepares students to be literate and articulate members of the Jewish community and citizens of the world,” she said.
Bnot Shulamith’s hiring of Mrs. Billet has been an open secret for about a month but the school made the official announcement in a letter to parents this week. The letter described her arrival as one of several significant, even transformational, developments the school would undergo in the next several years.
The opening of a ninth grade next year would be one such development; another would be the completion of a planned move to a property large enough to accommodate the entire institution. Currently, Bnot Shulamith is spread out in two buildings on Irving Place in Woodmere and a third on Washington Avenue in Lawrence.
The move to a campus in Inwood has been delayed by a legal battle launched by parents of Bnot Shulamith's sister school in Brooklyn, Shulamith School for Girls. They hope to thwart the executive director, Rabbi Moshe Zwick, who plans to shut down operations in Brooklyn and transfer the institution’s assets to the Five Towns.
Billet is the third top-level female educator in as many weeks to join a school in the Five Towns. Rochelle Brand, currently head of school at Yeshiva University High School for Girls, will now head the middle school at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Far Rockaway. Esther Eisenman will become the menahelet (dean) of Shalhevet High School for Girls.
