As a kindergartener, Madeleine Fruchtman was the kid with a clipboard and pen pretending to take attendance. So it’s no surprise that she pursued teaching.

“I always knew I wanted to be a teacher,” the Vienna resident said.

Fruchtman’s uncle worked as a special educator. “He was the one who told me to double major in special education and early childhood education, so I double majored,” she said. “Through my college internships and courses, I knew that the special education path was for me.”

After graduating from Towson University, Fruchtman earned her master’s in special education from the American College of Education.

She will become the director of Sulam@JDS in August after seven years of teaching third graders in DuFief Elementary School’s Learning Center Program. Sulam is a special education inclusion program that provides educational, social and emotional support for students with disabilities in select Jewish day schools.

Her job will be to facilitate and train the Sulam team at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, ensuring that Sulam students are receiving academic and social-emotional support during the school day, communicating and setting up meetings with parents and “making sure that everything runs smoothly, so that students achieve their goals.”

“I’ve loved being a classroom teacher,” Fruchtman said. “I knew I wanted to move forward in a more leadership role with[in] education, but continue that path of working with special education and special needs students and students with learning disabilities.”

Celebrating students’ growth was one of the highlights of her previous role, such as a third-grade student who came to her reading at a kindergarten level, then nearly surpassed the first-grade level by June.

“I love celebrating those little wins, and I think that’s what makes special education so rewarding,” Fruchtman said. “They may be the underdog or may need that extra love and support.”

She said she’s fostered such meaningful relationships with her students that at the end of the year, some of them cry and hug her because they don’t want to leave third grade.

“As someone who had educational disabilities growing up with ADHD, I know how hard school is,” she added. “School is hard in general, and then adding on an educational disability or learning disability, it makes life challenging.”

When Fruchtman saw Sulam@JDS’ job posting on LinkedIn, she thought it was “too good to be true” because it combined leadership, Judaism and disability education “all into one.”

“I applied immediately and then really fell in love with the people when I went for interviews, tours and follow-up conversations,” she said.

Being around so many fellow Jewish professionals is reminiscent of Fruchtman’s days at Camp Louise, a girls’ Jewish overnight summer camp in Maryland.

“I joke how it feels like camp, being around all these people with the same values as me and working towards the same goal,” she said. “It’s very different than public school. I worked with Jewish colleagues and had Jewish students, but just being around everyone who has those same values is so special, and especially within education. It’s tying all my favorite things together.”

Fruchtman was raised in a “pretty Conservative” Jewish household in Wilmington, Delaware. She and her brother, the grandchildren of two Holocaust survivors, attended Jewish summer camp and celebrated the holidays.

“Judaism was such an integral part of my childhood,” said Fruchtman, adding that a key part of her upbringing was visiting Israel on a Birthright trip.

She said she looks forward to merging her Jewish identity with her professional role in a couple of months. But the job isn’t always easy.

“Being a special educator is extremely challenging, and to be able to rise up to those challenges year after year has been very rewarding,” she said.

Drawing upon an analogy she used with her former students, Fruchtman feels that she has the skillset to excel in her new role.

“Having seven years’ experience in the classroom with hands-on experience as a special educator, my toolbox is very large when it comes to handling parent situations, behavior situations, knowing what academic interventions to use,” she said.

Fruchtman addressed a misconception about students with learning disabilities.

“People may feel … that these kids aren’t able to make progress, or they’re so behind that they’re never going to catch up,” she said. “And to those people, I would say with the proper interventions and supports, these children really can excel. It’s when those supports and opportunities are not given to them when they’re struggling to catch up academically or socially-emotionally.”

She spoke to the importance of the support system that Sulam provides its students: special educators, instructional assistants, speech pathologists and social workers.

“This whole team around these kids, [on] top of the JDS staff, really builds up this big family of support,” Fruchtman said.

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com