Larry Berman’s day starts before he’s out of bed, checking Microsoft Teams and both his phones from his New Jersey home. The first real question isn’t about Ramaz at all; it’s about traffic, and whether the Great Neck bus company has swapped drivers again without matching the Ramaz calendar.
That small detail—a school day hinging on a bus contractor’s decision an hour before the first bell—is a fitting introduction to Berman’s job. As Chief Operating Officer, he oversees security, facilities, IT, the health office, private transportation and food service across all three Ramaz campuses. “Everything touches my department,” he said.
Most students go four years at Ramaz without thinking about who decided the entryways should be bulletproof, who picked the new food vendor, or why the lower school feels newer than the others. This is the operation the building runs on without anyone noticing.
Berman shares a workspace with about 20 to 25 other administrators—IT, Institutional Advancement, Communications, the business office, and HR—a group that used to sit in the middle school, where a plaque still marks the old “Operations Office.” Rising enrollment and smaller, more differentiated class sizes forced the move. “Enrollment is high enough across our campuses that we don’t have the space,” he said.
Each campus has its own personality. The lower school, rebuilt after a fire in July, 2011, is the newest and has the fewest facilities issues—but the largest enrollment, close to 500 with its early childhood program.
That overlap creates real friction. Victor Cruz, the director of facilities, oversees all three buildings but can’t be everywhere at once. Thankfully, on the days where Cruz cannot make it to the upper school, there are at least 5 facilities team members to fix any issues..
Most physical maintenance happens after hours: a night cleaning crew of four to six people spends about four hours in each building, a schedule that falls apart the moment an evening event runs late and the crew has to work around guests instead of an empty building.
Mamadou Deme is the Director of Security and oversees all security across the three campuses. In his time at Ramaz, security has changed more visibly. New entry vestibules—”man traps”—replaced doors that were reinforced but unlocked, giving guards a fully separated, bulletproof space. The building itself has gained heightened protection. Berman stated, “It’s an actual layer of defense.” A new visitor policy, sent ahead of arrivals as photos to the security team, is partly a response to rising anti-semitism concerns nationally.
Food has been this year’s biggest overhaul. After roughly ten years with Five Star Foods, Berman ran a formal request-for-proposal process last November, spelling out Ramaz’s needs—three kosher buildings, about 1,100 students, 300 employees. Eleven companies responded; Ramaz chose Butter Beans, a vendor Berman had worked with previously. Around 65 percent of Five Star’s staff moved over with the switch. 80 percent of upper school staff moved over too.
Even so, food draws the most complaints of anything he manages. “Something is too hot, too cold, too healthy, not healthy enough,” he said. “You can’t have only chicken nuggets—there has to be a salad bar. It has to be balanced.” Nutrition plays a major role in ensuring that all types of eaters and dietary restrictions have the appropriate balance of food.
Running three campuses in Manhattan means running them without much room to spare. Berman’s team recently cleared out decades of stored props and set pieces, throwing away roughly 70 percent of what had been sitting in offsite storage for decades before consolidating what was left into a smaller unit uptown.
Bigger decisions move slower by design. A recent library renovation required buy-in from the librarian, facilities, Head of School Dr. Noam Wasserman, Upper School Principal Rabbi Aaron Frank, Head of Institutional Advancement Kenny Rochlin, and donor considerations tied to the room’s history, producing new carpet and lighting, but not everything that had been requested. “I don’t want to make rash decisions,” Berman said. “I listen to people. I hear things out.” He was direct that the deliberateness has a cost, comparing Ramaz’s pace to a smaller institution nearby that moves faster simply because it has fewer layers of process: a tradeoff he accepts rather than one he loves.
Five years in, Berman said what keeps him coming back isn’t the routine; it’s the absence of one. He likes the unknown. As he said, “there’s always room for improvement, and that’s what drives me.” His calendar the day before this interview held five unrelated meetings, from food-program tech support to a call with the board president — none of it visible to a student walking past.
That, more than any single project, may be what the back of house at Ramaz actually is: not a department, but a constant, largely unseen act of translation between a dozen people’s needs, running quietly enough that the first bell rings on time and almost no one asks how.
