TORONTO — In September, Robyn Hochglaube and her husband Kevin Gandy are opening the type of school they couldn’t find for their own young children.

In September, Robyn Hochglaube and her husband Kevin Gandy are opening the type of school they couldn’t find for their own young children.

Wentworth Preparatory School is the city’s “first private school with a Jewish perspective,” say the couple, who are also directors of Camp Green Acres, a Toronto-area day camp.

As of September, it will be housed at Temple Sinai, according to the school’s website.

Wentworth Prep – as in its website name wentworthprep.com – is not a parochial school, said Hochglaube, a native of Montreal who attended Jewish People’s Schools & Peretz Schools there.

“We want the culture of Jewishness, but we want the focus to be academic,” Hochglaube told The CJN.

She will serve as school administrator for the foreseeable future, while Gandy, an accountant, will take more of a behind-the-scenes role, dealing with financing, fundraising and outdoor education.

The new school, which will charge tuition of $11,000 for full-day junior kindergarten, will not offer instruction in religion, but it will provide a Hebrew-language component.

Children will also celebrate Shabbat and learn about Jewish holidays, while non-religious Jewish content will be embedded in the general curriculum, Hochglaube said.

“It’s not the focus of the school [that will be Jewish]. It’s more the environment of the school… The concept is that the Jewish community should have a private school to compete with the Upper Canada Colleges, the Havergals and the Bishop Strachans.”

Daily physical education classes and outdoor education will be a major component of the curriculum, Hochglaube and Gandy said. Among other possible excursions, they plan to bus students to Green Acres once a month for “experiential learning,” said Gandy.

French language instruction will begin in Grade 2, but Spanish will start earlier, in junior kindergarten, and will feature more prominently, because Canadians do more business with Spanish-speaking countries, according to Hochglaube.

She said that her son would have gone to a Jewish day school, but that a bad experience dealing with the administration before classes even started changed their plans.

Wentworth Prep is open to both Jewish and non-Jewish students, who will learn the same Jewish content as their peers, she said. “We want them to be global citizens.”

Hochglaube, who studied economics and has an MBA, began meeting with representatives of established private schools two years ago to understand how they started. She said she was heartened to learn that it wasn’t uncommon to start in rented spaces with as few as half a dozen students.

As of last week, she had five students enrolled for the fall, and two teachers on staff.

Hochglaube also met with Bryan Keshen of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, who shared demographic and statistical data about Toronto’s Jewish community with her when the school was in the early planning stages.

Keshen – then the federation’s vice-president of strategic planning, and now executive director of the Prosserman Jewish Community Centre and the Schwartz-Reisman Community Centre – told The CJN recently that Toronto’s Jewish community has “a great number of people interested in identifying Jewishly, but not necessarily religiously.”

Hochglaube said the school hasn’t looked into being affiliated with the federation’s Centre for Enhancement of Jewish Education (“the Mercaz”), which is currently regrouping after a major reorganization that saw its staff cut by about two-thirds.

The school – whose name, Hochglaube said, is a “strong, English old-school type of name” and also the name of a street in a Jewish area of her native Montreal – is starting with junior kindergarten through Grade 2, but the goal is to eventually provide education through high school.