DJCC’s new Early Childhood Services director glad to head preschool in Jewish environment

Only 10 days into her new job, Audrey MacKenzie had to handle tasks that any manager would dread: staff layoffs and the closure of a service delivery site.

The night before, on the evening of May 18, the Jewish Federation board decided to discontinue its DJCC north preschool site because of insufficient enrollment.

While the successful preschool at the Boonshoft CJCE in Centerville would become the DJCC’s only preschool location, MacKenzie had to gently break the news to staff and parents that there would be no north site after May 27, the end of the preschool year.

“When life hands you tough situations, you just do the best that you can,” says MacKenzie, who was promoted last month from a classroom position at the Boonshoft CJCE preschool to become director of DJCC Early Childhood Services.

“I was looking forward to the challenges of running the two centers, but believe me — I’ve still got plenty of significant challenges ahead,” she says.

“My big priorities will be supporting families and supporting staff. I don’t think these were being achieved over the past few years. I saw frustrations on both ends.”

MacKenzie has 27 years of experience surmounting challenges in early childhood education.
For four years, she served as director of a local Kinder Care Learning Center.

The company then promoted her to the position of district manager, supervising 18 centers. She held that job for 12 years.

A Chicago native, MacKenzie received her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb in 1977.

“You’re fortunate if you find something to do in your life that is your life calling. And I always felt that being involved with children in some way has been my life calling.”

She and her husband, Gordon — whom she met in college — have been married for 27 years.

They have two sons in their 20s: Christopher and David.

“After I left Kinder Care in 1996, I was doing Mommy & Me classes at the Kettering Rec Center part time,” she says. “Gina Kahn and Phyllis Royce took classes with me when their oldest boys were 2.”

Kahn and Royce approached MacKenzie when the Boonshoft CJCE was being built in 2002.

“They said, ‘this center is opening up and you have got to go and apply for a job to become a teacher.’ And that’s what brought me here.”

MacKenzie says part of the draw to work for the DJCC was the chance to learn more about her Judaism.

“Both sets of my grandparents had kept kosher,” she says. “But when my parents married they made the choice not to do that. They were Reform. They went to temple on the High Holidays.”

Her late father emigrated from Russia to New York in 1926 at the age of 9.

“It was more important for my brothers to get a Jewish education than it was for the girl to get the Jewish education, at least in my family.

“That’s part of what was so exciting for me to come into this environment — fact that I would get the Jewish education that I had not had when I was growing up.”

She says that when the Federation asked her to interview for the director’s position, she was a bit reluctant at first.

“I did hesitate when asked, because I really enjoyed my time back in the classroom,” she says.

“It’s really been fulfilling for me. But I always had missed the management part of it. I’ve always liked being the one to see things and make things happen. I saw a need, so when I was approached it piqued my interest.

“This is where I feel I was meant to be. So here I am. And I’m very excited.”