Right before the beginning of the school year, before the start of preseason and the buzz of a joining a new grade, a small group of students arrived at Abington Friends School to get to know the campus.

These students were new to AFS, some new to independent schools altogether. This marked their first official week on campus. But where most orientations begin with agendas, powerpoints, lectures and handouts, this group was welcomed with a spread of bagels, pastries, fruits, and juice to start with a community breakfast.

“How are you feeling today?” With that simple question, Mikael Yisrael, Director of Equity, Justice and Engagement at Abington Friends School, opened the floor for the new cohort of students to begin to express themselves. 

Each student was invited to identify their feelings on the provided mood meter, a tool Mikael used at the start of each morning. 

“It’s neither corny nor childish to sit and reflect and talk about your emotions,” he told them. “That’s what we do here. We’re a reflective institution. We leverage silence to not only think about ourselves, but also about how we show up for each other.”
It’s a small ritual with a big purpose: helping students learn the language of belonging.

Building in a “Jumpstart”

For Mikael, who has worked in admissions, college counseling, and student life at both secondary and post-secondary schools, this work comes naturally. “So much of my career has been about recruiting and yielding students,” he reflects, “but after helping them get in, my job becomes helping them to stay, thrive, and feel seen.”

Now in his eighth year at AFS, Mikael has spent a lot of time thinking about the orientation process for new students. Certainly this includes logistics like how to log-in to Canvas, where to find your classrooms, how to submit assignments. But it also includes more nebulous things, like culture and the feeling of belonging. 

“You start to realize that everyone comes from different backgrounds. Not everyone starts at the same place,” he explains. “How do we create time and space to be intentional about supporting students who might need that extra push—or that jump start, if you will?”

That’s how the Jumpstart Program was born, a two-week summer bridge for incoming Upper School students, designed to help them acclimate to AFS culture, meet peers and faculty, and begin the school year feeling confident, connected, and known.
The inaugural cohort was intentionally small: one eighth grader and nine Upper School students. “We wanted to be very intentional about how we structured the cohort,” Mikael explains. “Not only scholar athletes or individuals from one particular demographic. It would include students new to Quaker education, some first-generation independent school families, maybe someone homeschooled since COVID. There are all students who would benefit from this kind of support.”

A Place to Explore and Figure Things Out

The program’s design reflects years of Mikael’s experience. “I used to work at a boarding school where students came in at 14, and parents would say, ‘My baby is going away!’” he laughs. “We built orientation programs to help them adjust not just academically, but socially and emotionally. I brought that mindset here.”

The days were full and intentional. Each morning began with the mood meter. Each afternoon ended with reflection: a “high,” a “low,” something they were proud of, and something they wanted to do better tomorrow. There were workshops on conflict resolution, talking across difference, and understanding your body’s responses to stress, facilitated by longtime educator Latoya Miller, who Mikael says led what students dubbed “our group therapy session.”

“They came out of that saying, ‘We feel like a community now,’” Mikael recalls.

There were campus tours, a Quaker 101 session with School Committee members, a Chat and Chew with an AFS Alumna, and presentations from department leaders: experiential learning, athletics, technology, student support. “They already know what an ‘ExProgram’ is, what Meeting for Worship looks like, what my office works on,” Mikael says. “When those things come up later, they’re not foreign. They’ve already been personally invited into those spaces.”

And there was downtime, too. Puzzles, board games, pick-up basketball. “We’d go in there and play, talk trash, have fun,” Mikael laughs. “Joy matters. That’s part of belonging, too.”

Delivering on the Promise of Belonging

Mikael thinks often about how to measure the impact of programs like Jumpstart. “Engagement and a sturdy sense of self,” he says.

“Those are my metrics. How emotionally regulated are our folks? How well-adjusted? Can they name their triggers and manage conflict in healthy ways? That affects the whole school climate.”

“By the end, students were saying, ‘I feel comfortable now coming back to school. I don’t feel new. I already have friends.’ They even started their own group chat,” he says, smiling.

He envisions building on AFS’s existing climate surveys to track growth in belonging year over year. “We did a study a few years ago about the psychological sense of school membership,” he recalls. “If we continue that, we can actually see how belonging increases over time.”

In future years, Mikael and his colleagues plan to track belonging metrics—engagement, adjustment, and psychological sense of school membership—to measure the program’s impact. But Mikael is already seeing evidence in the hallways: new students volunteering in class, greeting teachers by name, joining teams and clubs with confidence.

"They feel sturdy,” he says. “And that’s what we want: a sturdy sense of self, the courage to belong. I want them to know that high school is hard for everyone. Whether you’ve been here since kindergarten or you’re brand new, it can be a lot. But here, you’re not doing it alone.”

“Every day’s an adventure,” he says, smiling. “And if you start that adventure with belonging, you can go anywhere.