About 50% of Sderot’s residents are new immigrants, most from Ethiopia or Kavkaz (a mountainous region in the Former Soviet Union).  Many of their children reach kindergarten with limited understanding of Hebrew.  Linguistic difficulties grow into developmental and learning disabilities, which worsen with time.  According to research carried out by the Brookdale Institute in 2004, half of these young immigrants are defined as “weak students” by the time they reach first grade.  Gradually their position worsens until high school when many of them drop out.

In most kindergartens in Israel, the staff finds it difficult  to meet the special needs of these children on an everyday basis (King et al., Brookdale Institute 2005). 

Shefa is a language enrichment program operating in kindergartens to identify and help immigrant children with linguistic difficulties.  In Sderot alone, about 300 kindergarten children are diagnosed with linguistic deficiencies every year.  Shefa provides linguistic enrichment classes in small groups, led by a kindergarten teacher.

Shefa has been operating since 2004 in partnership with the Sderot Municipality’s Department of Education and has helped Sderot’s immigrant children make impressive progress, in general, and in their language skills, specifically.

Due to limited funding, the Shefa Program was only able to treat 50 children during the 2008/2009 school year.

Gvanim thanks its Program Partners:  Ministry of Education; Sderot Municipality, Department of Education