How do ORT Israel’s teachers and administrators—caught between budget cuts and the increasing needs of anxious students—help them cope with ongoing violence and terror? How, in an environment of fear and the unknown, can they teach efficiently? How can they teach at all?

ORT Israel’s superior faculty has found a way. Despite the challenges they face every single day—striving toward academic success is formidable in a country at risk—ORT Israel has scored many accomplishments to brag about. Here are but a few:

• Officially recognized by the Ministry of Communications, the ORT Rothschild-Hashomron Comprehensive High School in Binyamina was granted a permit to broadcast a 27-minute community magazine twice a week through a cable television operator servicing an area between Haifa and Netanya. The magazine, ORTV, recently began experimental broadcasts. Each segment documents major events at the school as well as in the community, providing both news and other information.

• ORT Israel students who participate in the Sunflowers Project—which pairs ORT Israel students with hospitalized children receiving cancer treatment—were honored with the President's Volunteer Award at a July ceremony held at the President's mansion in Jerusalem.

• Eighth-grade students at ORT Religious Comprehensive High School in Beit Shean exported science to America through a unique “Technology and Halacha” project. The Israeli students presented their prototype via videoconference to students in Cleveland, Ohio. Among the presentations: a Shabbat clock and a Shabbat elevator.

• ORT Yad Lvovitch Comprehensive High School in Netanya earned second place in the educational initiative for environmental science. The school received a prize of NIS 10,000 awarded by Minister of the Environment Tzahi Hanegbi and Minister of Education Limor Livnat.

•A group of students from ORT Rehovot was invited to the President’s Mansion and awarded a monetary prize after earning second place out of 150 groups in a project led by the JDC aimed at awareness of Ethiopian culture and strengthening bonds between these immigrants and their communities.