In the summer of 2018, a group of individuals, all local to the Phoenix Metropolitan Jewish community, initiated a discussion that would lead to the founding of The Oasis School. This group identified the opportunity for a Jewish community high school that would provide an extraordinary education. The founders tasked themselves with answering the following:
1. How can the quality of being a “Jewish school” be defined in order to serve the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Jewish community?
2. What type of education is an “extraordinary” education?
To date, the founding members and Board of Trustees have worked to develop the school, with efforts that have included meeting with various professionals and advisors in the realms of education, school building, school finance, school leadership, curriculum and recruitment, as well as with Jewish community leaders and organizations, surveying the needs of the greater community, conceptualizing and refining the school’s vision and educational model in order to promote community-wide participation, and taking the necessary legal and financial steps to actualize this endeavor: creating an innovative, coeducational Jewish community high school that offers an extraordinary education.
The Board of Trustees has participated in complex discussions in service of the naming of the school. Collectively, it was decided that the intent of the school was echoed by the idea of bringing nourishment to a desert; as students in the local community are longing for an extraordinary option for secondary education, so does the desert imagine an alternative. In one discussion with a local Jewish community leader, the name Oasis was born.
The Mishnah mentions Neve Midbar, an oasis amidst the desert, and Jewish commentaries have demonstrated the parallels between an oasis in the desert and the role of Judaism in bringing nourishment to the Jewish soul. An oasis offers something beyond survival; it offers the opportunity to thrive. The sentiment of Neve Midbar, an oasis in the desert, now informs The Oasis School; it affords local community high school students the extraordinary opportunity of thriving.