ORT Alon has a long-standing policy of respecting every student's family traditions – a policy it was particularly anxious to implement in the case of the Ethiopian Jewish community. For this reason, the school decided to adapt the community's traditional Coffee Ceremony (marked by the drinking of coffee and the eating of Ethiopian anjara bread) for weekly meetings between the students and the school's guidance counselor. These group meetings offer an appropriate forum for answering questions and thrashing out problems as they arise. The school also incorporated traditional Ethiopian dance into its program of dance education.

The school believes it is most important to reinforce parental authority for all its students, and especially for those of the Ethiopian Jewish community. In many families of this community, there is poor communication between parents and children, owing to the parents' lack of good Hebrew skills and the children's ignorance of Amharic. The school sponsored a series of workshops for parents and students, conducted by an Amharic-speaking social worker. These workshops improved both intergenerational communication and parent involvement with the school. For parent-teacher conferences, the school also provides the services of a translator-mediator to bridge the gaps that arise from differences in language and culture.

ORT Alon is now in the process of implementing a new program for teaching English to the Ethiopian Jewish community students. The school also sends a student delegation from the eighth grade each year to Atlanta (Yokneam's twin city), where students from the Ethiopian Jewish community receive an intensive exposure to the English language.

ORT Alon was particularly proud that an eleventh-grader from the Ethiopian Jewish community recently won a prize for Excellence in Community Service, for his leadership role among the students. The prize, contributed by driving instructor Ofer Gilead, was a free driving instruction course and payment of the driver's license examination fee.

The Jewish Agency joins ORT Alon – Yokneam in embracing and supporting the Ethiopian Jewish community, for the betterment of the school and of the entire town of Yokneam.