Chalkbeat

As federal immigration arrests rise in New Jersey, teachers share strategies to help students

2026-08-31T17:03:02+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to get the latest news about the city’s public school system delivered to your inbox.

As New Jersey students head back to school, teachers say they are preparing for a school year shaped by uncertainty for immigrant families.

The impact of stepped-up immigration enforcement is showing up in classrooms, particularly in schools with larger immigrant populations. Immigration enforcement isn’t a new topic for students, but teachers say the situation is now taking a heavier toll, even as they try to create a sense of normalcy in school.

Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New Jersey rose by nearly 150% from May to July, and reached the highest level for any month in at least four years. The number of deportation orders and voluntary departures also increased in New Jersey courts from May to June.

At a rally over the weekend outside Delaney Hall, a federal immigration detention facility in Newark, teachers from Newark, Orange, and Passaic joined labor unions and Newark library workers to speak out against immigration enforcement activity they say is disrupting students’ education.

They described the steps they will take to support students who may be grappling with immigration issues at home. Some teachers said they will create classrooms for students to talk through what they’re seeing and hearing, including discussions of immigration enforcement throughout U.S. history. Others said they are trying to make room for students to process anxieties or fears and validate their experiences.

In New Jersey, ICE agents generally can’t enter public schools without a judicial warrant signed by a judge, per the state. But state and local policies aren’t always clear to students, and teachers are often the ones to explain them.

Tracey Luz, a Newark Public Schools high school teacher in the Ironbound, a neighborhood where most of the residents are immigrants, recalled last spring when news about an ICE raid at a nearby seafood depot reached students mid-class. Based on what they were seeing online, students thought ICE agents were at the school, until Luz clarified the situation, she said.

“They were really upset,” Luz said. “We talked about it and told them you have to keep one foot in the reality that these people are stalking your neighborhood and your family, but you also have to keep one foot in the reality that you’re a senior, and you’re going to graduate.”

In the Passaic Public Schools district, U.S. history and geography teacher Terry Fitzgibbons said he’s focused on building the topic into the curriculum itself, rather than addressing it head-on, so students can open up more easily.

“I certainly don’t have all the answers and can’t 100% relate to what they’re going through,” Fitzgibbons said.

He said he weaves in lessons on migration, labor, and the history of political movements, and lets students engage with the topic on their own terms.

A comment from one of his students last year stuck with him: “‘Hey Mr. Fitz, we are more vulnerable than we appear.’”

For other teachers, the current political climate calls for acknowledging what students are experiencing, even if it means departing from how they usually handle classrooms.

Bradley Gonmiah, a former Newark Public Schools high school physics teacher, recalled an instance this past school year where a student pulled out his phone mid-class to show classmates a post about ICE activity near a school.

Instead of telling the student to put his phone away, as he would have in other situations, Gonmiah said he acknowledged that the situation was “messed up.” A short conversation about the issue followed.

“Validating that it’s something that’s affecting us inside and outside the classroom is something that needs to be addressed,” Gonmiah said.

Some teachers say talking things through is not always the right answer. Sonya Noebels, a math teacher at Orange High School in the Orange Public Schools district, said she and her colleagues try to keep classroom routines consistent and give students time where they don’t have to focus on what’s happening outside of school.

“Some of these students who are living this just need a place where they know what’s going to happen and where they don’t have to be thinking about everything that’s going on, and they can just be kids and do school,” said Noebels.

For Andrew Worthington, an English teacher also at Orange High School, making students feel comfortable and helping them think critically about the political landscape is crucial.

“Hopefully they can start thinking about these issues themselves, which they already are but maybe not in the most organized or structured way,” Worthington added.

While teachers are struggling to find the balance between incorporating conversations about immigration during class time and creating a sense of normalcy in school, some advocates say schools should offer more direct support to students.

The New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children has a partnership with Jersey City Public Schools to offer free legal services to high school students through the Beacon program, an effort other school districts could replicate, said Katarina Martucci, an attorney with the program. Students can enter the program by themselves if they don’t want to involve an adult, Martucci said.

Martucci and her team also speak with teachers who often say they don’t know how to help students. She said simple things like putting up “pro-immigrant welcoming posters are a good way to show students that their existence at school is also important and helps instill trust.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark is banking on New Jersey’s future in film with new high school

2026-03-12T22:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to get the latest news about the city’s public school system delivered to your inbox.

New Jersey, the home of the world’s first film studio, is reasserting its status as the country’s first Hollywood.

And Newark educators, students, and industry professionals are getting ready to meet the moment.

In November, Newark Public Schools officials announced plans to open New Media High School, which will be geared toward film and TV careers and digital creator roles. Students with stars in their eyes no longer have to move to Los Angeles to make their dreams come true.

“They don’t even have to travel into New York across the Hudson River,” said Desireè Hadley, director of the Newark Office of Film and TV.

The New Media High School website promises a September 2026 opening and a school that will prepare a new generation of “content creators, filmmakers, and digital entrepreneurs to shape the evolving landscape of entertainment and new media.” A mission statement defines part of that preparation as “industry experiences” that will be key to building student portfolios.

Superintendent Roger León declined to comment through a spokesman.

But in public statements, León has said the school is already recruiting new teachers and eighth grade students interested in attending New Media High School and becoming part of the school’s first ninth grade class can apply through Newark Enrolls.

A career pipeline is ready and waiting: Investment in film and TV production is surging in New Jersey, having hit a record high of $833 million in 2024, and a major movie studio is moving into Newark, bringing the promise of hundreds of jobs.

These days, Hadley marvels at the massive “now enrolling” New Media High School billboard in downtown Newark.

“I’m Newark born and raised, and I wish that these opportunities were around when I was in high school,” she told Chalkbeat. “It would have been amazing to be able to attend a New Media High School or to even have exposure to what a production set is like.”

Film production grows in Newark and New Jersey

The growth of New Jersey production, fostered by the 2018 restoration of state film tax credits, stands in contrast to flagging production in Los Angeles. In the next two years, Lionsgate, Paramount Skydance and streaming giant Netflix will open Garden State studios. This bustling vision channels the 1910s, when studios like Fox, Universal, and Goldwyn Pictures called Fort Lee home before the industry moved to Hollywood.

Lionsgate Studios Newark is scheduled for a spring 2027 debut at Great Point Studios in the city’s South Ward. Mayor Ras Baraka, then-Gov. Phil Murphy, and city officials marked the groundbreaking in December. The $125 million, 270,000-square-foot studio will occupy the 12-acre site of the former Seth Boyden housing complex.

New Media High School, set to move into the former Dayton Street School, will be its neighbor.

The Dayton Street school, which closed in 2012, has another industry connection: It was a filming location for Adam Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore 2,” Netflix’s biggest U.S. movie opening, which spent a record $152.5 million in New Jersey.

Young people in Newark are already getting their start in the industry.

Aspiring cinematographer Nia Foote, 18, interned as a Newark locations production assistant on the set of Kevin Kline and Laura Linney’s new MGM+ series “American Classic” and was a PA on “72 Hours,” Kevin Hart’s upcoming Netflix movie.

“I was considering going out west to California,” Foote said. But Hollywood’s production decline and New Jersey’s surge persuaded her to study film and TV production at New York University instead.

Zoe Williams, 20, is eyeing a career in set design.

“I thought I would have to be going to New York for the jobs, but they’ve all been in New Jersey — in specifically Newark, a lot of them,” she said.

Williams has been an intern or PA on a number of productions, including Timothée Chalamet’s “A Complete Unknown” and the upcoming “Paper Tiger” with Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller.

Zoe Williams worked as a production assistant on a movie set in May 2025.

Newark is taking measures to add even more locals to film sets. Last year, the state Economic Development Authority awarded a $750,000 NJ Film Works grant to Invest Newark, the city’s economic development corporation, to fund workforce training for people 18 and older.

“Some of the students will be matriculating on to an apprenticeship program, which is great because that means they’re putting in the hours to get their union cards, and that translates as a career,” said Jon Crowley, executive director of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission. As part of that program, Rutgers Newark’s Community Media Center will host grip training at Express Newark, where Newark Film School will also run PA training, Hadley said.

“We will have all these huge movie stars come into our community, but the city of Newark is making sure it covers the ground of just helping our residents, educating our residents on the industry,” she said.

Newark and Essex County have played important roles in the history of film. Newark’s Rev. Hannibal Goodwin patented transparent flexible nitrocellulose roll film in 1898 and Thomas Edison opened the very first film studio, Black Maria, in West Orange in 1893.

“We’re just taking back our birthright,” said Diane Raver, executive director of the New Jersey Film Academy, which runs certificate programs at 13 colleges, including Essex County College.

And future New Media students could find work at other Jersey studios.

Netflix is accepting applications to work at its soon-to-be $1 billion studio at the former Fort Monmouth, and Paramount Skydance signed on for a minimum of 10 years at Bayonne’s 1888 Studios. Recently announced: the $250 million Filmology Labs, headed to Paterson.

“Now we see a direct pipeline to the studios who are moving in,” said Keith Strudler, dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. “We’ve looked at the kinds of roles that they’re going to be hiring for, and really, we teach all of those skill sets.”

New Media High School could be ‘a filmmaker’s dream come true’

Director Nicole L. Thompson, a Malcolm X Shabazz High School alum and founder of the Newark Film School, said New Media High School will be “a filmmaker’s dream come true.”

Thompson, 33, began studying filmmaking at 13, in a pre-college summer program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She continued with video production at Shabazz and went on to study at The College of New Jersey, the University of Southern California, and Harvard.

“A lot of people wake up one day and want to become a filmmaker but they don’t know how,” said Thompson, whose 2022 Lifetime TV directorial debut, New Jersey true crime movie “Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story,” recently spent two weeks in Netflix’s top 10.

Newark Film School founder Nicole L. Thompson, at right, with student Destiny Diamond at a documentary class at St. Stephan's Church.

At New Media High School, curriculum plans include classes in narrative filmmaking, short documentaries and short-form videos for social media and commercials, along with editing, cinematography, postproduction, podcasting and streaming. Capstone projects will cover feature-length films, animation, 3D effects, pitching and marketing.

“It almost replicates the model of Arts High School,” said Hadley, director of the Newark Office of Film and TV. “The school is going to train young people who are interested right out of middle school.”

The New Jersey Performing Arts Center and Great Point Studios will also partner with local schools to develop a film and TV production curriculum, said John Schreiber, CEO of NJPAC. He’s a stakeholder in a community benefits agreement between Lionsgate Newark, Great Point, and the arts center. (NJPAC is a redeveloper of the Seth Boyden housing site.)

“We started very early talking about what a new studio like this could mean to the community at large, and then more specifically to young people,” Schreiber told Chalkbeat. He noted that the studio agreed to hire 70% of its onsite employees from the local area, likening the “transformational” potential of the film hub to how Steiner Studios changed Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“We will work with Newark Public Schools and with Great Point Lionsgate to create an apprenticeship and an internship program for high school students, the goal of which is eventually that they learn enough so that they can get a union card and go to work on a set,” Schreiber said. “One needn’t go to college in order to get that card … Those jobs can pay over $80,000 a year and more for a young person.”

Schreiber aspired to be an actor when he was younger. After realizing he’d be “broke for 10 years,” he became a PA.

“There are 50 different jobs that somebody can have in our business that support the work of a performing artist,” he said.

“It’s not just about acting and directing,” said Nick Day, president of the Screen Alliance of New Jersey, an industry group, and co-CEO of Newark’s Edge Auto Rental, which supplies trucks and cars for productions. “There’s electricians, carpenters, rental truck companies … lumber companies, stages, postproduction … Whatever your passion might be, the film industry could be a way to take advantage of your passion.”

That doesn’t just mean people starting their first careers. East Orange’s Jessica Sledge, 38, works in education and is a student in one of the first New Jersey Film Academy classes at Essex County College. She was studying industrial design in New York when a field trip to a professor’s set design workshop made an impression.

“I’ve always been a fan of watching all the behind-the-scenes stuff,” she said. With the intro film class at ECC, it “clicked,” she said. “I was like ‘OK, so this could be my way into doing something like that.’”

Jon Crowley, director of the state film commission, got his start as a PA for the Academy Awards. After an editor fell ill, Crowley, a film school graduate with an editing reel, subbed in and was promoted to editor. It all started with his high school TV production class.

“To actually be working with your friends on projects that we were scripting, we were directing, we were acting in and then we were editing was really exciting because it felt like you had some skin in the game,” he said.

Crowley said the commission would be excited to work with future New Media High School students.

“It’s phenomenal that kids at the high school age are going to be able to experience all these different areas of expertise and skill sets and find out what really gets them fired up, for sure,” he said.

Newark’s West Side High School debuts 403 Salon and Spa, giving students hands-on cosmetology experience

2025-12-11T21:24:33+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to get the latest news about the city’s public school system delivered to your inbox.

The first time West Side High School senior Jovonna Robinson picked up a blow dryer and hairbrush to style a client’s hair, she felt nervous.

Robinson, who’s part of the high school’s cosmetology program, worried her client wouldn’t like her work and feared she would run out of things to talk about. But after a year of interacting with customers and practicing finger waves, pin curls, and other hairstyles, Robinson now feels confident in her skills and is considering a career in cosmetology as she nears graduation.

“I actually want to be a dentist, but if it doesn’t work out, I’m definitely going to pursue something in cosmetology. I really love, just, the whole setting of talking to [customers] and making sure they’re comfortable,” said Robinson.

Now, Robinson and other West Side High cosmetology students have a new place to learn their craft: 403 Salon and Spa, a full-service salon located on the first floor of the school. During Thursday’s salon debut, students like junior Amelia Liley were grooming their customers’ cuticles and getting their nails ready for a new coat of paint. Others, like senior Nakira Poole, were giving their classmates facials.

West Side High School teacher Ms. Harper gets a manicure from junior Amelia Liley at the new 403 Salon and Spa on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025.

Like a traditional beauty salon, 403 Salon and Spa is equipped with a front desk to check in clients, a waiting area, and several hair styling stations with blow dryers, brushes, tall mirrors, and swivel chairs. The salon also includes a hair washing station and a manicure and pedicure area.

Towards the back of the salon, a private room with a spa bed is available for facial and wax services. Roughly 100 students are enrolled in the cosmetology program, but only those who’ve obtained a permit, a certification that allows students to perform cosmetology work under supervision, will practice their skills.

A price list was not available on Thursday, but the salon plans to offer a variety of services, such as shampoo and blow dry, hair cuts, braiding, hair coloring, scalp treatments, and skin and nail care by appointment to the public on Fridays between 3-7 p.m., according to Paul Brubaker, the district’s spokesperson.

Salon coordinator and the school’s cosmetology teacher, Nicole Daniels, said she was adamant about creating a space that allowed students to feel like they were working in a real salon. Daniels learned cosmetology in high school, an opportunity that allowed her to work during college, save money, and pay for schooling as she completed her science degrees. It also helped her buy her first home at 26, Daniels added.

“I want our students to be able to, yes, get a college degree, but not have to worry about how they’re going to pay for their books, pay for their meals, because now they have a license and credentialing that they can have for the rest of their lives,” said Daniels at Thursday’s grand opening.

West Side High School senior Marquesha Gordon washes senior Kylah Masey's hair at the new 403 Salon and Spa on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025.

Alternative career paths are on the rise

Since returning to local control, Newark Public Schools, under Superintendent Roger León, has launched new trade-focused schools, including Newark Vocational, which offers pathways in culinary arts and hospitality, and the Newark School of Architecture and Design, which offers tracks in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical work.

Those efforts are on par with research that shows that, for the last few decades, just over 40% of recent high school graduates have enrolled in a four-year college. That number has been fairly stable, even as high school graduation rates have grown.

In 2024, only 45% of teens saw a two- or four-year college as their most likely step after high school, down from 50% in 2021 and 73% in 2018, according to research from the American Student Assistance, a nonprofit helping students make informed choices about their career goals. At the same time, students considering vocational schools, apprenticeships, and technical boot camp programs more than tripled from 12% in 2018 to 38% in 2024, according to the nonprofit.

To get a cosmetologist hairstylist license in New Jersey, students must be 17 or older and are required to complete 1,200 hours of instruction at an approved school, pass state exams, and apply to the state board of cosmetology. Those seeking certification as a manicurist or skin care specialist have similar requirements but require fewer hours of instruction. The new salon at West Side allows students to complete their required hours and earn their license by the time they graduate.

That’s a perk for West Side junior Dsyiah Ferdico, who said 403 Salon makes her feel excited about her future. While wearing an apron that read 403 Salon, Ferdico soaked her toes in a foot tub as Robinson, her classmate, sat on a stool to give her a pedicure. To Ferdico’s right, senior Kylah Masey rested her head on a shampoo bowl as senior Marquesha Gordon scrubbed her scalp.

West Side High School junior Dsyiah Ferdico soaks her toes in a foot tub as she prepares to get a pedicure from her classmate.

Like some of her classmates, Ferdico plans to pursue a career in cosmetology after high school, and eventually wants to open her own salon. Ferdico credits the program with teaching her how to engage with clients and lean into her expertise by recommending services and hair styles.

“If you want to pursue cosmetology after you graduate, you can do hair, and you can decide what services you want to do,” Ferdico said. “You don’t have to do everything. You can do what is personally for you. That’s what I love about this. I love how it makes you so confident.”

Jaylen Johnson, a junior football player at West Side, started the cosmetology program thinking he would learn how to be a barber and solely work on men’s hair. But after being exposed to different aspects of the program, he felt comfortable learning how to do braids and other techniques to style women’s hair. With the rise of AI and new technology, Johnson also feels cosmetology is a career “robots” won’t be able to do.

“Learning self-grooming is always wonderful and learning how to groom your peers is always necessary,” said Johnson on Thursday. “Everybody needs haircuts. And that’s one thing I look at, that robots and stuff won’t be able to do.”

Robinson, the senior cosmetology student, agreed that “doing hair is always going to be needed” and is thankful for the opportunity to explore a career she hadn’t considered before.

“It’s good to learn different skills,” Robinson said. “It’s not always good to be stuck on one mindset. I opened my options of what I want to do.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Public Schools students head back to class. Here’s what’s new this school year.

2025-09-02T18:21:34+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to get the latest news about the city’s public school system delivered to your inbox.

On the first day of classes for Newark Public Schools on Tuesday, students dressed in dark blue polo shirts walked through the doors of the Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design, marking the long-awaited opening of the district’s newest campus after a three-year delay.

Dozens of students and their families walked down Jefferson Street to reach the entrance of the high school, located in the heart of the city’s East Ward neighborhood, an area with a high number of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking families. Students walking to school passed by the construction site of the school’s new gym and auditorium, slated for completion by June 2026. Cars lined up on the side of the school as students said quick goodbyes to their parents before running to the entrance.

One mom kissed her daughter and blessed her with the sign of the cross. Another gave her son a tight hug before he walked through an archway of blue, white, and silver balloons, representing the school colors.

The school opens with a freshman class of 240 this year, marking a significant milestone for the district and students starting their high school journeys. The district plans to add a grade level each year.

Kendrick Thomas, one of the students walking to the new high school, carried his summer reading assignment, a poster explaining 1960s pop culture that he created after reading “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton. Thomas is excited to start high school and plans to specialize in the HVAC track, one of three specialties students can choose to study.

Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design ninth grader Kendrick Thomas shows Chalkbeat his summer project on Tues., Sept 2, 2025.

“I chose that because I think I’m good with my hands and, like, it sounded interesting and different,” said Thomas, as he rushed to get to school before the bell rang at 8:15 a.m.

Aside from the HVAC track, the School of Architecture also offers students a chance to specialize in plumbing and electrical trades, while also exploring architecture and interior design. According to district officials, the program will enable students to graduate with both a high school diploma and a trade license.

The new high school is housed in the Ironbound neighborhood at the former St. James Hospital building, which had stood vacant for years before being repurposed. The school was scheduled to open in the fall of 2022, but stop-work orders issued by the state’s Labor Department over wage complaints and changes in contractors delayed the project.

Superintendent Roger León was at the school early Tuesday to greet students, who were among the roughly 40,000 Newark Public Schools students returning to classrooms. He waved to parents driving past the school and shook hands with kids eager to start their first day of classes in a new building.

One mother, who asked to be identified as Maria due to fears of immigration enforcement, said her son, who has a disability, felt nervous to start high school, let alone a new school. But after attending freshman orientation and meeting with teachers and the school’s principal, Soraia Mendes, he was put at ease. The mother hopes León and district leaders will boost efforts to help students with disabilities and better communicate with parents.

“I just hope he gets the academic support he needs,” said Maria in Spanish to Chalkbeat on Tuesday.

Across the street, at the intersection of Congress and Lafayette Streets, cars swerved around pedestrians and honked at each other. A crossing guard held a stop sign as a mom and her three children navigated the busy intersection to reach Lafayette Elementary School. A group of siblings held each other’s hands as they ran down the block and into the elementary school building.

An adult and three kids cross the street on the first day of school on Tues., Sept. 2, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey.

In addition to the opening of the new high school, the 2025-26 school year brings other significant milestones, as well as challenges for the state’s largest public school system.

This school year marks the district’s fifth year under local control after 25 years of state takeover. It also marks the fifth year of León’s 10-year strategy, known as “The Next Decade: 2020-30,” an ambitious plan aimed at tackling learning loss, implementing new curriculums, addressing emerging issues, and adding more teachers, among other goals.

León’s contract is also under consideration for an extension through 2030, which would make him the longest-serving superintendent in New Jersey. The Newark school board has scheduled a public hearing on Sept. 25 to discuss and vote on the proposal.

This school year, district leaders must also address a host of concerns, such as how to support the growing needs of schools as student enrollment increases, manage district finances, tackle transportation issues, expand academic recovery efforts, fix the district’s aging buildings, and assess the effects of anti-Blackness following concerns of racial harassment at a city high school. The district is also expanding AI technology to support student learning and identify struggling readers.

This spring, the Newark school board approved a $1.57 billion budget that included more money for teachers, school renovations, and an increase in charter school payments as district leaders said they budgeted conservatively in light of potential changes to federal funding.

What’s new this school year?

Newark Public Schools will implement new state mandates this year as it works to boost student performance and address other issues. Since 2022, the first year New Jersey students took the state standardized tests since 2019 due to remote learning, standardized test scores have pointed to student difficulties in writing and English language arts.

Newark Public Schools students enter the Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design on Tues., Sept. 2, 2025. The school opened for the 2025-2026 school year after a three-year delay.

In response, New Jersey this fall is launching its new Literacy Framework, which requires public school districts to screen students in grades K-3 for reading difficulties. In Newark, schools will use Amira Learning, an AI-powered tool, as a universal screener to assess students’ ability to read, sound out words, and identify areas needing support.

The state is also introducing a new “adaptive” version of its standardized tests this school year, in which the difficulty of test questions is adjusted based on student responses, according to NJ Spotlight.

León has also said the district is experiencing a growth in student enrollment, which has prompted the opening of new schools and grade-level expansion in others. This fall, Nelson Mandela Elementary School expands to grade 5, Michelle Obama and Sir Isaac Newton Elementary schools expand to grade 6, Ironbound Academy expands to grade 7, and East Ward Elementary School expands to grade 8, according to the district.

The boost in enrollment prompted the district in March to budget for 53 new positions consisting of 20 teachers, 11 aides, and 23 school support staff. It also allocated an additional $1.4 million to support the expansion of schools and an extra $8.1 million to accommodate an additional 1,600 students in the upcoming school year, according to this year’s budget.

The district is also expecting an increase in the number of and English language learners and students with disabilities who require special education services.

Historically, Newark has struggled to implement programs and support for students with disabilities. At the beginning of last school year, some of those students missed class due to enrollment issues that left parents scrambling to find solutions. Students with disabilities also face greater learning challenges as they have been some of the hardest hit by the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The district has not released data on the number of bilingual and special education teachers it has hired for the upcoming school year.

A crossing guard helps students cross a busy street on Tues., Sept. 2, 2025 on the first day of school in Newark, New Jersey.

District leaders are also working with the state’s School Development Authority to replace 13 school buildings built before the 1920s, but the deal leaves out 20 schools that need to be replaced, district officials had previously said.

Last school year, León estimated that roughly $2.5 billion is needed to fix Newark’s dilapidated school buildings. After ruling out a bond to supplement the cost, district officials used some of their capital reserve funds to finance renovations for Newark Schools Stadium and the cafeteria at Sussex Avenue. It was the first time the district used some of its capital reserve funds to finance school renovations.

Newark is also bracing for the potential impacts of ongoing federal changes to education. At the start of the year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to close the U.S. Department of Education. León in March said the district was aware of potential setbacks in federal funding and would make modifications and pivot as needed, but provided no details about its plans to address potential federal cuts.

On Tuesday, as the opening bell at the School of Architecture rang at 8:15 a.m., parents chatting outside began to disperse. They hugged goodbye and wished each other a smooth start to the school year.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Public Schools partners with NJ LEEP to launch new program to help students get to college

2024-11-01T19:23:18+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

At the beginning of his senior year in September, Samuel DaSilva was in the dark about the college application process.

The senior at East Side High School said the process seemed “long-winded” at first, as he recapped his experience to a room full of Newark education leaders on Friday.

A soon-to-be first-generation college student, DaSilva wasn’t sure where to begin, and his parents didn’t know much about the process either. He also didn’t know about the types of scholarships he could apply for until NJ LEEP, a nonprofit working with first-generation and low-income students to help them reach college, explained the process to him and his parents.

Through a partnership with Newark Public Schools and a grant from MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving Foundation, the nonprofit will launch a school-based program next year at Central and East Side high schools to expand students’ access to college opportunities and support high school students like DaSilva.

“NJ LEEP staff spent a lot of time informing my family and I about the long-winded, multifaceted college application process,” said DaSilva at a press conference at Central High School on Friday. “Now that I’m in the midst of these applications, they are my guiding anchor and my guiding light in all of this.”

With application deadlines for colleges and universities approaching, students are busy thinking about what school they want to attend and writing personal statements while savoring their last moments of senior year. But even after students submit their college applications, those who are the first to go to college or come from low-income families face additional challenges, such as finding ways to pay for college, navigating the new Better Free Application for Federal Student Aid, understanding financial aid options, and deciding what to major in.

Newark Public Schools, NJ LEEP, Mayor Ras Baraka and other elected officials held a press conference to announce the start of a pilot program that provides opportunities for district students to develop skills and participate in experiences to help them achieve success in college.

NJ LEEP will support district students in getting a college education by providing college resources and guidance to students at Central and East Side for the first time. The nonprofit has been in the community since 2007 and has previously supported students in their college process. The new partnership will allow NJ LEEP to connect with students and provide their services after school, at Saturday school, and during the summer at no cost to the district.

The nonprofit will hire district teachers and counselors who are familiar with the students, schools, and community to guide students before, during, and after the college process, according to NJ LEEP. They offer a range of services from SAT/ACT prep to opportunities to develop social-emotional skills, internships, field trips, and volunteer experiences.

Superintendent Roger Leòn on Friday said the district understands the necessary support system needed to get to college and by providing NJ LEEP’s program in two district high schools, they are providing students with “someone who understands all of the work.”

Ziven Lewis has also benefited from NJ LEEP’s resources. A sophomore at Central High School, Lewis has been a part of the organization’s program since middle school. He said his confidence has grown, his grades have improved, and he’s been able to manage his responsibilities while also playing football at Central High School.

“Seeing how much I’ve grown from last year, I am confident that I will be able to achieve the goals I have for myself. I’m excited to begin exploring life after high school,” said Lewis during Friday’s press conference.

Newark Public School’s Class of 2024 earned $169 million in college scholarships, and 48.9% of students in the Class of 2023 completed their freshman year in college, said León on Friday. The statistics point to the need to provide continuous support to students after high school, León added.

“The ultimate goal is not only graduating students from high school — we know we do that — but actually having them successfully complete college as well,” León said.

DaSilva, the senior at East Side, said NJ LEEP “changed the future outlook of his life” and has increased his confidence and public speaking skills through the nonprofit’s resources. He completed his college applications on Thursday and is a finalist for the QuestBridge scholarship, a program that provides full four-year scholarships to high-achieving students from low-income families.

He wants to attend Case Western Reserve University and major in mechanical engineering.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

West Side High School celebrates new entrepreneurship program with Leonidas Foundation

2024-11-01T19:20:09+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

West Side High School celebrated the launch of the school’s new L.E.O. (Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Opportunity) Program in partnership with the Leonidas Foundation on Monday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. West Side received a $15,000 endowment from the foundation for the development and launch of the program, and the grant will support it for at least five years.

West Side Principal Akbar Cook, West Ward Councilman Dupré Kelly, Leonidas Foundation Vice President James Ebert, and hip-hop legend Anthony “Treach” Criss of Naughty By Nature attended. The ceremony took place at the school’s newly redesigned business center, the centerpiece of which is a stock ticker.

The L.E.O program, which began this week and will extend into next fall, is teaching 19 juniors business skills such as public speaking and networking.

Students had to fill out both an online application and questionnaire. Dale Omowa, one of the students selected, never envisioned himself in a program like this.

“I would never be doing this if not for this class. I would be at home sleeping,” Omowa, 17, said. “But now, there’s so many people, so many things to do, so many opportunities, and I want to take advantage of this.”

Jamal Smith, the program’s teaching advisor initially was hesitant to take on the extra work. “But [Principal Cook], he always talks about being extraordinary and not ordinary,” Smith said. “And he asked me, ‘So, you want to be ordinary?’ and I’m like, ‘Nah, I don’t want to be ordinary.’”

Smith is glad he took the chance and is able to show students a path to entrepreneurship.

“I think starting a business is very important for students to understand, especially at this age, so that if they don’t go to college, or if they don’t do something else they’ll have entrepreneurship to lean on,” he said.

Cook described the program as “a happy marriage, because we are the school of business and finance, and the Leonidas Foundation talks a lot about entrepreneurship, and kids finding a way to a living wage. But how do we get them to a living wage? And I think this is one of the out-of-the-box ways of thinking to get them towards that.”

The Leonidas Foundation, founded in 2017, honors Leonidas Vagias, who passed away in 2016 in a car accident while in college at the University of Rhode Island studying business. Vagias was one of the top kickers in the country. His father, Ted Vagias, who’s on the board of trustees, said that “families, friends all got together and said, ‘We have to honor Leo’s name,’ because he loved his school, loved business, the camaraderie. So that’s when we said, ‘Let’s start a program that is just like Leo.’”

The program began at Leonidas’ high school alma mater, Don Bosco Preparatory High School, an all-boys private school in Ramsey, then expanded to Mount St. Dominic Academy, an all-girls academy in Caldwell. West Side is now the first coed and public school to host this program.

Matthew Frankel, a spokesperson for the Leonidas Foundation, said West Side was chosen as the first Newark public school because of its emphasis on work-study opportunities for students.

“Our first two programs were at private schools, so it was a more involved process of getting into the public school system,” Leonidas Foundation Vice President James Ebert said. “So that’s what makes today a big, big milestone for us.”

“When you’re fighting for Newark students and ensuring every child is provided equity, this is what it looks like,” Kelly said. “And it starts with creating innovative and valuable programs like this for our children and rightfully provides opportunities that they deserve.”

Darius McClain is a Rutgers University-Newark reporting intern for Chalkbeat Newark covering public education in the city. Get in touch with Darius at dmcclain@chalkbeat.org or reach the bureau newsroom at newark.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Teachers Union, district reach tentative deal in battle over Global Studies racial report

2024-10-22T22:21:43+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

The Newark Teachers Union reached a tentative settlement with the district on Monday in lawsuits demanding the release of a report detailing the racial, cultural, and religious dynamics at the Newark School of Global Studies after incidents of racial harassment surfaced in 2022.

As part of the proposed deal, Newark Public Schools would ask the union to withdraw two lawsuits it filed in 2023 and 2024 without admission of liability or fault, according to a letter filed in Essex County Superior Court on Monday by Eltia Montano Galarza of the Taylor Law Group, the district’s attorney in the cases. The full details about the tentative settlement and whether the district would release the Global Studies report as part of the deal have not been disclosed by either party.

The union’s lawsuits are part of a more than two-year battle between the community and the district over the lack of solutions and transparency after incidents of racial harassment against Black students and staff at Newark’s Global Studies High School surfaced two years ago. Since then, district leaders have provided few details about the steps they have taken to resolve the issues at the high school. Superintendent Roger León has said the report would remain confidential and inform the district’s diversity strategy, which remains private.

The proposed agreement comes three months after the union’s attorney, Raymond Baldino of the Zazzali law firm, filed a letter to the courts requesting an update on the case after Superior Court Judge Mayra Tarantino ordered a private review of the Global Studies report in January.

Montano Galarza, the district’s attorney, directed questions about the case to Paul Brubaker, the district’s director of communications. Brubaker did not respond to Chalkbeat Newark’s email about the case on Tuesday. Baldino said the union cannot comment at this time.

The Newark Teachers Union first sued the district in November 2023 for access to the Global Studies report after León said the document would remain internal and the union’s public records request for the report was denied in October 2023. In April 2024, the teachers union filed another lawsuit against the district after a second public records request seeking access to billing records and the contract between the district and Creed Strategies, the firm that was hired to conduct the Global Studies report, was denied in February.

Chalkbeat Newark filed two public records requests in 2023 seeking the report, but the district denied those requests.

On Oct. 9, the district’s attorney filed a letter to the court arguing that the union’s second lawsuit over Creed Strategies billing records and its contract with the district is “moot” because the district later provided the documents. In an Oct. 10 response, Baldino, the union’s lawyer, argues that the documents, which had since been provided to the union, show the district violated state public records laws because they were denied in the union’s initial request for the records in February.

“Despite the absurdity of claiming to not have records related to Plaintiff’s requests related to such a substantial public contract, Defendant now has the audacity to claim that its delay was in good faith,” Baldino said in the letter filed in Essex County Superior Court.

District plans after racial incidents at Global Studies remain private

In November 2022, Black students at Global Studies spoke at a board meeting about the racial harassment they endured at the high school. In response, in January 2023, the Newark school board commissioned the Creed Strategies report analyzing the cultural, racial, and religious dynamics at the high school. The incidents at the high school resulted in at least half a dozen Black students requesting transfers and two Black teachers resigning.

Despite the continued calls for more transparency into the issue, the Global Studies report has not been made public. In June 2023, León said the report would not be released publicly despite requests from members and community leaders, including the NAACP Newark branch. Deborah Smith-Gregory, who leads the NAACP Newark, said she has been asking the district to release the report or provide a summary of the findings but has not heard back.

“Nothing about the report was ever released, and that’s wrong. It is a blatant disrespect by the district,” said Smith-Gregory in a call to Chalkbeat Newark on Tuesday. “And now mind you, the young people who were involved have graduated. They’ve graduated and they’ve gone on, and this still lingers.”

In September 2023, the district provided the first and only glimpse into the unreleased review by releasing three recommendations that call on the district to assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system, foster conversations about racial issues, and build school staff’s capacity to identify cultural gaps and create an environment that is racially conscious and inclusive. In a school board meeting that same month, León said that “people not having the report in their hands doesn’t mean that there isn’t work … occurring” at the school.

The recommendations came as the high school’s former vice principal, Hoda Abdelwahab, left the district. She was among those called out by parents during board meetings and in legal claims filed by former teachers at the high school for handling the issues poorly. Parents of students at the high school also called for the removal of Global Studies principal, Nelson Ruiz, who has remained in his role.

During a November 2023 school board meeting, board member Crystal Williams asked León for an update on the changes at Global Studies, if any, and member Allison James-Frison said she hoped the report would be released.

Former board member and now Essex County Commissioner A’Dorian Murray Thomas during that meeting also said the district needed to be “firmer and clearer” about its plans to fix the problems at the high school.

But Smith-Gregory on Tuesday said she feels “disappointed in the board” because “members have one job, and that is to hold the superintendent accountable.”

“They didn’t press to get information that could be shared with the public. They did not do that,” Smith-Gregory added.

In documents submitted to the Superior Court in December 2023, León argued that releasing the report would have a “chilling effect” on discussions about racial dialogue and sensitivity practices at Global Studies and districtwide.

Two former Global Studies teachers also filed legal claims with state and federal offices in 2023, alleging they experienced harassment and racial hostility from students and supervisors. The allegations of racial harassment against students and staff are currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, according to Jim Bradshaw, a department spokesperson.

In an email to Chalkbeat on Tuesday, Bradshaw wrote that the “Office for Civil Rights does not comment on pending investigations.”

“We know something happened and we know that there was some type of injustice somewhere,” Smith-Gregory said, “but what are the specifics?”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark’s high school of architecture, design expected to open next fall after three-year delay

2024-10-18T20:55:26+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

When Superintendent Roger León announced the opening of a new trade school in the city’s East Ward three years ago, he touted the school as an opportunity for students to fast-track their technical careers and earn a contract to work with Newark Public Schools.

But the project has been plagued by worker complaints over unfair wages and late payments that launched a state investigation. The Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design, originally scheduled to open in fall 2022, is now set to open in September 2025, and the developer of the site says a new stop-work order issued to a subcontractor is not expected to slow down the timeline.

District officials this week refused to answer questions about the school’s expected opening next school year or whether students will see the new school listed as an option when the district’s enrollment system, Newark Enrolls, opens next month.

Partial construction at 155 Jefferson Street, the site of the former St. James Hospital being overhauled into the new school, was interrupted last month after the New Jersey Department of Labor issued the latest stop-work order to Allied Construction Services L.L.C. of Newark, one of the subcontractors performing work on the property, for failing to pay workers a proper wage and keep payroll records, among other violations.

It was the second violation over improper wages for a project that has had its completion date delayed for three straight years. District leaders have said the school will teach students about skilled trades, interior design, and architecture.

Despite disruptions, the developer of the property says it is on track to complete the first phase of construction by January 2025.

In 2021, the district entered into a $160 million, 20-year lease with the developer of the property and Summit Assets CEO, Albert Nigri. In 2022, Newark spent $672,000 to hire engineering consulting firm Remington & Vernick to help the district with construction management services, such as reviewing contract documents, project schedules, securing bonds, insurance, and permits, according to the firm’s website. But it’s unclear if the district has accrued new costs over the years.

In an email to Chalkbeat Newark on Wednesday, Paul Brubaker, the district’s communications director, said the delayed opening was due to “reasons beyond the district’s control” and directed construction questions to Nigri.

Nigri told Chalkbeat Newark on Friday that changes in contractors, subcontractors, and an increase in the size of the building per the district’s request have impacted the delivery date. Allied Construction Services, the subcontractor issued the state stop-work order in September, was fired from the project last month, Nigri said. He did not say who replaced the company.

The state Department of Labor issued the first stop-work order in September 2022 to Summit Assets, Townhouse Builders Inc. of Brooklyn, N.Y, the general contractor of the site at the time, and Dimension Contractors LLC of Newark, the subcontractor at that time. That order completely halted work on the site for months before Nigri hired a new contractor and subcontractor, Hughes & Hughes General Contracting of New York, N.Y and Allied Construction Services L.L.C. respectively.

The Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design is set to focus on three trades – plumbing, electricity, and HVAC – and allow students to study architecture and interior design. The curriculum will also give students a high school diploma and a license for trade work, district officials have previously said.

The new school, district officials have said, would bring life to the dilapidated hospital building that has stood vacant for years in the middle of the city’s Ironbound neighborhood. When it opens, the school will first enroll ninth-grade students and add a grade level each year, wrote Brubaker via email.

The state’s second stop-work order came weeks before the Nov. 2 opening of Newark Enrolls, the only way city students can apply for a spot at their preferred district school for the coming year. That day, the district also holds its annual all-schools fair, where families can learn more about Newark schools and meet teachers and staff.

The latest version of the amended lease, approved by the school board in August, lists the high school’s updated opening date as fall 2025. The amended lease includes three new deadlines for the completion of the school: by Jan. 9, 2025, the base of the school building must be completed; by July 30, 2025, the newly constructed gym and auditorium must be completed; and by Sept. 1, 2025 the building must be completed, according to that lease obtained by Chalkbeat Newark through public records.

On Tuesday morning, a few workers walked on the construction site of the new school, where windows and plywood could be seen on the outside of the building.

The new high school is meant to help address the country’s shortage of skilled trade workers while carrying out León’s goal to expand the district, reclaim former public school buildings, and stop the expansion of charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded. District leaders are also working to upgrade some of the city’s oldest public school buildings, many of which need new heating and air conditioning systems and upgrades to boilers and roofs, among other needs.

Ahead of filing wage complaints with the state in 2022, laborers at the high school’s construction site told TAPInto Newark that poor working conditions were making their jobs unsafe and many were being paid in cash.

In September 2022, after the state’s first order stalled work on the construction site, dozens of union worker workers showed up to a school board meeting demanding that León intervene after they were forced out of work and owed wages. During that meeting, León acknowledged some of the confusion by addressing laborers’ complaints and reiterated the district’s plan to move forward with a September 2023 opening, which would later be delayed.

Under a previous timeline given by the district, the school was supposed to see its first graduating class in June 2027.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

High school graduation rates for Black boys improve, but disparities persist, report finds

2024-06-04T20:18:17+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Black boys consistently have the lowest high school graduation rates among all race and gender groups, a disparity that could be improved with more government investments, a new study looking at Newark Public Schools and more than a dozen other districts found.

In Newark Public Schools, the four-year high school graduation rate for Black boys was 72% in 2019-20, according to a new report from the Schott Foundation, a national organization that promotes equity in public education. That compares with 86% for all students in the district during that same year, according to the state’s school performance report. Black students accounted for a little more than one-third of the district’s enrollment during the 2021-22 school year.

The report also found that New Jersey had the fifth highest Black male graduation rate in the country, at 86% for 2019-20.

The study analyzed four-year high school graduation rate data between 2012 and 2020, the most recent data published by the federal government. The lack of “consistent” federal data is one of the reasons the organization produced the report.

“At the federal and state level, there needs to be more consistency in collecting and publishing this data,” said John Jackson, president and CEO of the Schott Foundation.

During the 2022-23 school year, Newark Public Schools’ overall high school graduation rate was 86%, according to the state’s school performance report.

High school graduation is a significant indicator of a young person’s future success, Jackson said.

Jackson said establishing environments that promote success for Black boys in and out of school — what his foundation calls “loving systems” — is the key to raising graduation rates. But providing consistent support for Black boys also yields positive outcomes for all students, the report found.

“It’s not about establishing a few good schools. But again, it’s about building the loving system within Newark and all cities,” Jackson said.

For almost 20 years, the foundation has collected and analyzed national data on four-year high school graduation rates for Black boys compared with other student groups as a way to raise awareness about the challenges Black students face, such as poverty, housing instability, and racial segregation.

This year’s study is the organization’s sixth report to examine the rates in Newark Public Schools and 14 other school districts across the country with a large number of Black students enrolled.

It’s important to understand the challenges of all students, Jackson said, but specifically Black teens, a group whose average life expectancy has been affected by the negative effects of low high school graduation rates.

“The higher you go in your education level, the more likely you are to have access to health care, the more likely you are to own your own home, the less likely you are to be incarcerated or homeless,” Jackson said.

Although federal data on national high school graduation rates from 2021 to 2023 is missing, the study also points to the negative impact COVID had on students, specifically students who are Black. When the pandemic forced schools to switch to remote instruction, it hindered student learning but it also affected the health of Black people, Jackson added.

Following the pandemic, average Black life expectancy declined by four years, largely driven by Black males, whose life expectancy declined by five years, the largest decrease of any race or gender group, according to the report. Understanding the unique factors affecting Black boys outside school can also help create better reforms to keep them in school, Jackson said.

Jackson says New Jersey is an example of a place where state and community investments have worked to improve graduation rates, but rates for Black teens still lag behind national averages. Additionally, attending schools that are racially segregated and have a higher number of Black and Latino students also affects learning outcomes, Jackson said.

According to the report, racially segregated schools have higher shares of teachers with less than two years of experience, lower numbers of school counselors, and poor facilities.

Additionally, Black boys experience the highest rates of out-of-school suspensions and are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than white boys, according to the report. Black boys are also more likely to be navigating poverty and homelessness, which can often lead them to miss school, further raising absenteeism rates, the report found.

Despite the disparities, Jackson says there are bright spots that could help identify solutions and understand what works. But it’s important to “go beyond just analyzing the supports that exist within a school,” Jackson added.

Of the 15 school districts mentioned in the study, only one school district had a graduation rate higher than the national average: Mobile, Alabama, at 88%.

Black and Latino boys had similar graduation rates, with slightly higher rates for Latino boys in close to half of the 15 school districts examined, the report found. But in places where graduation rates for Black boys were high, all boys, including white boys, performed better.

“The data indicates that when we center Black males and provide the support to students of color, it benefits all students,” Jackson said. “So, this isn’t about taking from one group and providing to another. It’s about making the whole better.”

Additionally, the report found that outcomes for Black teens were better in areas with lower levels of socioeconomic inequality.

Generally, graduation rates for Black boys were lower in areas with high levels of unemployment and poverty, the report noted. Graduation rates among Black teens also tend to be lower in places with more segregation, indicating resource disparities within schools in those areas, according to the report.

Chicago, Newark, and Philadelphia school districts are within cities with “extreme levels of residential segregation” and particularly low high school graduation rates for Black boys. But in order to make widespread improvements in graduation rates for all students, Jackson said, federal and state leaders need to think about long-term solutions in addressing racial inequities.

“Quite frankly,” he added, “the federal government should really look at a stimulus package that is focused on families in creating loving systems and providing those levels of supports.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

From COVID masks to evening gowns: Newark’s Class of 2024 gets ready for prom

2024-05-23T10:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, inside Hillside’s Community Recreation Center, the sounds of basketballs dribbling on the court echoed from wall to wall and the smell of sneakers and rubber filled the air.

As boys yelled at each other to pass the ball, teenage girls and their moms walked along the side of the court until they reached a gray door.

Behind that door, a small room had been transformed into a pop-up boutique where eager young girls searched for the perfect dress for one of the biggest nights of their lives.

Their high school prom.

Inside, white curtains and drapes hung from the ceiling and a crystal chandelier dangled in the middle of the room. Dozens of bright, shimmery evening gowns and cocktail dresses in shades of hot pink, emerald green, and baby blue hung on racks beside a table full of jewelry.

This year’s prom holds a special meaning for this graduating class of seniors, who didn’t have a typical high school start. Their first day of freshman year in fall 2020 was marked by uncertainty as the onset of COVID forced a virtual start for schools in Newark. Many are still reeling from the effects of the pandemic.

Now, they’re trading in their COVID masks and medical gloves for shiny earrings, sparkly gowns, and formal gloves.

Miss Grand New Jersey Tiajah Elliott helps Central High School senior Jadaisha Hinton tie the back of her pale blue dress.

Jadaisha Hinton, and her friend, Nadiya Denis, were among the girls sifting through the racks at the boutique run by the Prom Princess Project, which organizes an annual dress giveaway for girls in Hillside and the surrounding areas.

The week before, the two Central High School seniors couldn’t settle on a dress – even after trying on several at the shop. Now, the girls were in the community center bathroom trying on more gowns.

Jamilah Hinton, Jadaisha’s mom, scrolled on her phone while she waited for her daughter and joked: “I think they’re going to pick something today.”

Saying yes to the perfect prom dress isn’t easy

Prom Princess Project is a decades-long project run by volunteers Hawaiian Thompson-Epps and Ember Lofton in partnership with the Systas 4 Systas organization.

For the last 13 years, the duo has curated a free and unique experience for girls looking for dresses for prom, graduations, or eighth grade promotions. The hope is to provide some financial relief for families who may not be able to afford the expenses that come with those events, Thompson-Epps said. Last year, the pop-up shop welcomed roughly 100 girls and this year, they expect about 150.

“This is their moment,” said Thompson-Epps. ”This is their time. How could we not help?”

When Jadaisha and Nadiya walked back into the boutique after changing into the gowns they had picked out, they were greeted by gasps and “aws” from volunteers who eagerly ran to their side to accessorize their outfits.

Central High School senior Nadiya Denis tries to decide between a pair of long dangling earrings or sparkly studs.

“I’m just excited to dance and have fun with my friends,” said Jadaisha, as she took a second to admire the long pale blue dress adorned with gold flowers she had on.

“What size shoes do you wear?” Lofton asked Jadaisha.

“I don’t know, I’ve never worn heels before,” the girl responded.

Jadaisha’s friend Nadiya stood next to her in a red satin dress as Lofton placed a frilly red fascinator hat on her head. The girls are going to their prom on May 24 together and said finding the right dress was hard, especially because they had never worn an evening gown before.

They fidgeted in their dresses and giggled at each other as they took selfies in the mirror.

“This is tight,” said Jadaisha, pulling her dress up her chest.

“You look good,” said Nadiya, who modeled long evening gloves that matched the vibrant color of her gown.

Miss Grand New Jersey Tiajah Elliott, who was there to style the girls and teach them how to walk in evening gowns, helped Nadiya try on different earrings before she settled on ones that dangled down her neck.

Miss Grand New Jersey Tiajah Elliott helps Nadiya Denis try on different earrings.

“It’s a privilege to help these ladies find a prom dress, especially because I graduated in 2020 and didn’t get to go to prom,” Elliott said, as she taught the girls how to sit and stand in their dresses.

Minutes later, Amyah Bowens and her mom, Shantay Bowens, walked through the gray door. Everyone cheered and welcomed them with hugs. Amyah, a senior at the Newark School of Global Studies, said she had also been there the week before and tried on a dozen dresses.

She originally wanted an off-the-shoulder gown with a high side slit but “it felt weird when I tried it on.”

This time around, Amyah tried on a red halter top dress that she paired with a white lace fascinator and a long necklace that draped down her chest. When she looked in the mirror, she was stunned.

She laughed shyly after Thompson-Epps, who had suggested she try on the dress, complimented her outfit:

“It’s giving elegant, classic,” the teen said. “That’s what I wanted.”

Amyah’s mom, Shantay, stood in the back admiring her daughter and holding in tears. She had promised not to cry until her prom toast-off on June 18. Amyah is headed to Long Island University in the fall, Bowen said, “something I’m not ready to think about yet.”

Amyah Bowens, a senior at Newark's School of Global Studies, shares a cup of Arizona iced tea with Miss Grand New Jersey Tiajah Elliott.

Teens practice prom etiquette during ‘tea time’

After saying yes to the dress, Jadaisha and Nadiya sat at a small table at the end of the room for “tea time,” as one of the volunteers called it – part of the Prom Princess Project’s mission to help the teens practice sitting in their dresses and feel comfortable in formal wear.

Denis took off her evening gloves to pick up her cup of Arizona iced tea. Jadaisha laughed as her long braids draped over the back of her chair.

Friends Jadaisha Hinton and Nadiya Denis giggle as they sip their drinks during tea time.

“I’m so glad you ladies picked your perfect dresses,” said Elliott, who wore a sparkling tiara and her Miss Grand New Jersey sash and chatted with the teens about their plans to go to Essex County College after graduation.

Then, Jadaisha and Nadiya changed out of their gowns and back into their school uniforms of white polos and khaki pants. They cradled their dresses in plastic garment bags and hugged the volunteers good-bye.

As they gathered their belongings, Jadaisha’s mom thanked Thompson-Epps: “Now, all we have to do is get her some Spanx and get her nails done and we’re ready.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Slow rollout of new FAFSA application delays financial aid offers for Newark students

2024-05-21T18:26:53+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Chanice Minnott knew she wanted to go to Syracuse University after going on a tour during her junior year of high school.

The senior at North Star Academy’s Lincoln Park High School had always dreamed of going to college outside of New Jersey and envisioned the experience she would have at a school like Syracuse in upstate New York. After being rejected on the first try, Minnott was finally accepted in January. She felt a sense of relief after fearing she would miss out on the experience she had imagined.

But nearly four months after receiving her acceptance letter, Minnott still hasn’t gotten her financial aid package. The delay could impact her decision to attend Syracuse next fall.

“I’m checking my portal every day hoping that something will pop up, but there’s nothing else I can do but just wait,” Minnott said.

Minnot is one of hundreds of Newark students who are anxiously waiting on financial aid offers after the botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

An updated application was supposed to make it easier for students across the country to receive their financial aid but the release was delayed. Nationwide, students have experienced trouble submitting the form and entering tax information, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The new form also presented challenges to immigrant families who didn’t have a Social Security number.

At Lincoln Park, students are experiencing long wait times to reach someone in the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office only to be hung up on, said Mark Stulberg, director of college counseling at the high school. The delays are the biggest problem in this year’s college admission process, he said.

“Typically at this point, all students would have financial aid packages from all their schools so their families can make informed decisions about where they’re going to go for college,” Stulberg said.

In New Jersey, several colleges and universities were forced to extend their enrollment deadlines to June 1 after the Better FAFSA form opened at the end of December 2023, months after the form’s typical release in October.

Students like Shamar Thompson, also a senior at Lincoln Park, said filling out the application was glitchy and he would often have to retype information into the form. Other times, he had trouble signing back into the application after it crashed on the FAFSA website.

Like Minnott, Thompson is also waiting to receive his financial aid offer from his top pick, Stockton University in southern New Jersey. He applied to 13 other schools but remembers the tears of joy he cried when he received his acceptance letter to Stockton.

Thompson also applied to Rowan University and received his financial aid package from the school. It’s his second choice, Thompson said, but he’s holding out on Stockton to get back to him.

“I’m feeling very nervous because I have to make a decision in a couple of weeks,” said Thompson last Friday. “And I’m also feeling extremely disappointed because it’s taken a long time for me to receive my aid and help from my college.”

If Rowan offers him more financial aid than Stockton, “it would impact my decision in a big way” because he doesn’t want to place a financial burden on his family, Thompson said. But he can’t make that decision until he finds out all his options.

Currently, about 45% of Lincoln Park seniors are enrolled in college compared to 80% around this time last year, Stulberg said. In Newark, roughly 57.2% of graduating seniors completed the Better FAFSA, above the state’s average of 45.7%, as of May 10 according to the National College Attainment Network FAFSA Tracker. Last year, the rate was 70.1%, a 12.9% difference from this year.

That rate drops to 41% for the total number of seniors in Newark who have completed the application as of May 20, per the New Jersey Children’s Foundation FAFSA Tracker.

In Newark Public Schools, students are required to complete the FAFSA form before they graduate. Students who choose to opt out of the requirement, have to complete an exemption form and meet with their parents and counselor to discuss plans after graduation, according to Nancy Deering, district spokesperson. As of May, 1,620 seniors have completed the district’s FAFSA requirement, Deering said in an email on Tuesday.

Earlier this year, the Children’s Foundation launched a FAFSA challenge between Newark and Camden to drum up excitement over completing the form. They are set to announce a winner on May 31 but so far, Camden trails behind Newark with a 35% completion rate. Other organizations such as the Newark Opportunity Youth Network and the Newark City of Learning Collaborative have hosted financial aid workshops and troubleshooted problems with families.

The New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority also offers help for students seeking tuition aid grants and support through the College Promise Initiative, which provides aid to students headed to community colleges and four-year universities. The Learning Collaborative also hosts information on available scholarships to students.

Despite the delays, Minnott says she is thankful for her counselors who’ve helped her try to contact Syracuse and federal officials to find answers to her financial aid offers. She plans to double major in psychology and neuroscience – hopefully, at Syracuse next fall.

Said Minnott: “It’s kind of like an endless cycle of just waiting.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

New Jersey advances bill banning high school graduation test requirement

2023-06-08T10:36:00+00:00

A bill to repeal a state mandate that 11th graders in New Jersey pass a statewide proficiency test to graduate high school got another green light from lawmakers Monday.

Critics of the exit exam argue that research shows standardized testing is not an accurate way to measure a student’s knowledge. They point to studies showing graduation exit testing isn’t a good predictor of how ready a student is for college, and say the testing unfairly hurts students of color and children from low-income families.

“I would agree we need some sort of measure, but we — as the legislative body, as a state, as administrators and representatives — should ensure that this measure truly tells us the quality of the educational program that the student is receiving, not the wealth or poverty or where they’re coming from,” said Jamil Maroun, Manville’s schools superintendent.

The Assembly Community Development and Affairs advanced the bill unanimously, and it now heads to the full chamber for a vote. An identical bill in the Senate awaits a committee hearing.

At Monday’s committee meeting, school administrators and education advocates wondered why schools are still required to administer the test as more states lift the requirement — and as New Jersey itself has not counted the exam since 2019.

New Jersey has required students to pass a standardized test to graduate high school since 1980, and is one of only a handful of states that still require it. New Jersey called off the test in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic, and last year juniors took the exam but did not have to pass it to graduate this year.

If students don’t pass it, they can still graduate by submitting a portfolio with their grade point average and results from another qualifying test, like the PSAT.

Education officials testified that students who have passed another test may not put in the effort to pass the proficiency exam, leading to hours of lost educational time in the classroom. Meanwhile, students who will not pass the exam are still forced to sit for hours to take it just to fail, they said.

Krista Whitaker spoke of her two sons, both of whom have Individualized Education Programs. Whitaker said her oldest son excels on regular classroom tests when provided with modifications like extra time and verbal guidance, but that help is not allowed for the high school proficiency exam, effectively forcing him to take a test he doesn’t understand and can’t pass.

“As of right now, my son cannot graduate next year,” Whitaker said.

According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, students from communities of color disproportionately fail high school graduation exams, creating hurdles for students seeking scholarships or shutting them out of college admissions entirely, contributing to the racial gap in high school graduation rates and college enrollment.

Opponents of the measure passed Monday say the test is even more critical in light of school disruptions during the pandemic. Althea Ford of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association said the test provides data to “assess the impact that the pandemic is having on our schools and children.”

Ford said weakening testing requirements could lead to a diminished workforce in the future because of lower standards to graduate. The state’s consistently high ranking for education is what attracts businesses to the Garden State, she said.

Paula White, executive director of education advocacy group JerseyCAN, also emphasized how testing offers a standardized way to measure proficiency in 11th grade. It would be a “detriment” to underserved students to do away with a data point that keeps school districts and teachers accountable, she said.

“Information is not an indictment … we have to stop putting our heads in the sand regarding information that we simply do not want to know,” she said.

Sophie Nieto-Muñoz is a reporter for New Jersey Monitor, where this story was first published. Sophie speaks Spanish and is proud to connect to the Latinx community through her reporting.

New Jersey Board of Education sets lower high school exit exam passing score after narrow vote

2023-05-03T19:49:20+00:00

After months of deliberation and recommendations from New Jersey’s top education officials, the State Board of Education voted to lower the high school exit exam passing score, a requirement for graduation.

On Wednesday, board members voted 6-5 to lower the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment passing score in the English language arts and math portions of the test to 725, down from the original 750 scores. The new scores apply to the classes of 2024 and 2025 and will allow more students to meet graduation requirements next school year, according to analyses provided by department officials.

Board President Kathy Goldenberg had the final vote on the decision and paused before voting in favor of the resolution to lower the passing scores.

“To be clear, I am listening to the experts in the field that feel that 725 should be the cut score,” Goldenberg said.

Despite the new changes, state board officials remained split over the decision, citing concerns about ensuring students’ graduation and career readiness. The vote took nearly two hours as board members reignited discussions about the usefulness of the test, the rigor of New Jersey graduation requirements, and the state’s response to helping students post-pandemic.

“We should think to ourselves as to what do New Jersey students need to know, what kind of level of mastery should they have on a subject matter for us to say here’s your certificate, you have succeeded,” said board Vice President Andrew Mulvihill who voted against the resolution during Wednesday’s meeting.

Similar to April’s board meeting, the New Jersey Department of Education presented an analysis of the spring 2022 high school exit exam results and reiterated its recommendation to lower the passing scores by citing the negative mental health and wellness impacts of the COVID pandemic on students. Last year, high school juniors took the exam as a trial run after Gov. Phil Murphy waived the requirement for the graduating class of 2023 due to the pandemic.

Of the high school juniors who took the trial run version of the exit exam in 2022, when the passing score was set at 750, only 39% passed the English language arts portion, while 50% passed math, according to state data. If the passing score had been lowered to 725 last spring, 57% of students would have passed math while 81% would have passed English language arts, according to data presented on Wednesday.

Angelica Allen-McMillan, the acting commissioner for the state’s Department of Education, said the recommendation to lower the passing score to 725 came through the work of educational experts, teams, and multiple discussions among state leaders. They analyzed data, known as performance indicators, that demonstrate mastery of specific knowledge and skills students typically show at different performance levels.

Board member Joseph Ricca said the expectation to think “that a 17- or an 18-year-old graduating from a public high school in the state of New Jersey has finished learning or is a master in anything” is a “flawed premise.”

“I think what we really need to recognize is providing multiple pathways for students to demonstrate mastery in certain topics as they developmentally progress. But also leaving them a lot of runway to continue to grow,” Ricca added.

The board’s Wednesday vote also set lower passing scores for alternate assessments that students who don’t pass the high school exit exam can take to meet the graduation requirement. According to state data on Wednesday, approximately 60% of students fulfilled their graduation assessment requirements by using state assessments in 2022, one of several alternatives for students who do not pass their high school exit exam. Alternate assessments include the ACT, PSAT, and SAT, among others.

The state Department of Education also projected that if the board kept the 750 passing scores, the class of 2024 could have resulted in nearly 40,000 portfolio appeals for English language arts and 22,000 for the math portion of the test. Portfolio appeals are a process typically requiring help from a teacher or staff member for students who have not met the exit test requirement.

In some districts, students must give up an elective during their senior year to take a portfolio preparation course. In other districts, support for the portfolio process is not always available.

The new passing scores approved Wednesday take effect immediately.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

New Jersey Board of Education continues to deliberate lower high school exit exam passing score

2023-04-06T10:30:00+00:00

New Jersey officials continue to weigh changes to the state’s high school exit exam roughly a month after students took the test as a graduation requirement for the first time in recent years.

The State Board of Education is considering a resolution to lower the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment passing score to 725 following an analysis of the spring 2022 test, which was taken by high school juniors as a trial run.

Currently, New Jersey students must get a 750 or higher in the English language arts and math portions of the test. High school juniors must pass the test to earn a high school diploma.

The New Jersey Department of Education presented an analysis of last year’s results on Wednesday and recommended the board lower the passing score. But some board members fear lowering state standards could result in students who are not college ready.

The board did not vote on the resolution, which would have gone into effect in early May and applied to the class of 2024 and 2025 and would likely have allowed more students to meet graduation requirements next school year.

The recommendations proposed Wednesday would also make it easier for students to pass the exam amid years of disruption and learning loss caused by COVID, as well as mental health challenges among school-age children. That could ultimately help boost the state’s graduation rate, which has remained relatively stable over the last five years despite the pandemic’s effects and suspension of graduation assessment requirements.

The state had a 90.9% four-year graduation rate for the class of 2022, according to state data presented on Wednesday.

In March, high school juniors took the exit exam as a graduation requirement for the first time in four years. The pandemic forced Gov. Phil Murphy to suspend the test in 2020 and 2021 along with other state standardized exams. Murphy also waived the requirement for the class of 2023 but reinstated it for the class of 2024 and 2025.

Of the high school juniors that took the trial run version of the exit exam last spring, only 39% passed the English language arts portion, while 50% passed math, according to state data. If the passing score had been lowered to 725 last spring, 57% of students would have passed math while 81% would have passed English language arts, according to data presented on Wednesday.

According to the Department’s Acting Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan, getting a 725 on the test is “just the right standard” while a 750 is “a more determined opportunity to further highlight what we want our students to know and do.” She also said the department had a responsibility to share “the adverse impacts” they believe keeping the score at 750 could have on students.

During Wednesday’s presentation, the department said its data found that a 750 passing score had an emotional effect on some students, especially students who have never missed a testing mark previously. It also limits the number of elective courses a student could participate in, since some might have to take a class senior year to prepare to retake the exit exam or an alternative test. Districts could also face additional burdens in paperwork and appeals to ensure students participate in graduation activities, the department added.

As board members weighed their options, some hinted at the redundancy in their discussion as it mirrored similar concerns raised during last year’s conversation on the topic.

Board member Elaine Bobrove said the board was “back to apples and oranges” in considering the differences between getting a 725 and a 750 on the test. Board member Nedd Johnson pointed to the department’s analysis and its expert opinion to lower the passing score.

“It’s pretty clear, from what I see, that the recommendation to the [passing] score going to 725 is based on the significant impact on student performance,” Johnson said.

Some members also called on the legislature to eliminate the exam altogether. Currently, New Jersey is one of nine states that requires a high school exit exam — that figure includes the state’s resumption of the requirement for the class of 2024. However, many states have ended exit test mandates in recent years due to concerns including unfair burdens they impose on some students and their effectiveness in determining college and career readiness.

Lawmakers are also considering a bill to eliminate the test requirement altogether. Last month, the assembly’s education committee unanimously approved Assembly Bill 4639, which would eliminate the exam as a requirement for New Jersey high schoolers. The bill is currently in the assembly’s community development and affairs committee.

“What we’re doing here is a fallacy,” said board member Ron Butcher. “We need to as a board go on the record recommending we get this removed.”

The board’s vice president, Andrew Mulvihill, disagreed and asked the board to consider the impact of “lowering the standards” in reaction to the learning loss experienced by students during the pandemic.

“I don’t think we should lower standards in reaction to COVID. I’m concerned about the approach we seem to be taking,” Mulvihill said. “I think our job is to say, what does a diploma in New Jersey mean and how do we know when kids are college and career ready?”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

New Jersey students take high school exit exam amid concerns about passing score, usefulness

2023-03-15T18:50:15+00:00

For the first time in four years, thousands of New Jersey students will take the state’s high school exit exam this week as a graduation requirement.

The testing comes as some states roll back the mandate and concerns persist about the test’s usefulness and ability to measure college readiness.

From 1979 until 2020, the state administered some version of the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment. But in 2020 and 2021, Gov. Phil Murphy suspended the exit test, which is given to high school juniors, along with other state standardized exams, due to the pandemic.

Last March, high school juniors took a trial run version of the exit exam after Murphy also waived the requirement for the Class of 2023 due to the pandemic. The state reinstated the requirement for the Class of 2024 and the Class of 2025. Shortly before students took that test, the state board of education raised the passing score for those students from 725 to 750, although the board also said it would revisit that score after reviewing results from the 2022 trial run.

On that draft version of the exam students took last spring, 39% passed the English Language Arts portion, while 50% passed Math in New Jersey, according to state data. Those results came after years of disruption and learning loss caused by COVID, as well as acute mental health challenges among school-age children.

Those results, along with the fact that the state so far hasn’t revised the passing scores for this year’s exam, have led to some pushback in New Jersey, which is one of nine states that requires a high school exit exam (that figure includes New Jersey’s resumption of the requirement for the Class of 2024). However, many states have ended their exit test mandates in recent years, due to concerns about unfair burdens they impose on some students, among other worries.

“Implementing a new, harder exit test in the middle of a pandemic, and a pervasive mental health crisis among young people, is unbelievably bad policy,” said Stan Karp, director of the Secondary Reform Project for the Education Law Center, a New Jersey advocacy group. “It’s tone deaf and harmful to students.

This month, Karp and his team sent a letter to the state’s department of education urging for a review of the passing score. They also called the test “high-stakes” for high school students who may have met other graduation requirements, but struggle with standardized assessments.

The Education Law Center estimates that the higher passing score of 750, instead of the 725 recommended by the department, reduced passing rates by 15% to 20% on each section of the test.

“The validity of the passing score is a matter of significant public consequence. The results of last year’s NJGPA administration emphasize those consequences,” the group wrote.

The state education department had not responded to Chalkbeat’s request for comment about the Education Law Center’s letter at the time of publishing.

Karp and his team have also questioned the usefulness of the test since it is not required by federal mandates, he said. They have questioned its capability to accurately capture “graduation-level competencies” for high school students who already take a slew of state standardized tests and other exams that measure student performance over the course of several years.

For those reasons, Karp and his team are supporting the bipartisan Assembly Bill 4639, which would eliminate the exam as a requirement for New Jersey high schoolers. The bill is currently in the assembly’s education committee and is up for a vote this week.

“The [NJGPA] does not provide any useful information to teachers or schools. The results arrive at the start of a student’s last year in high school, far too late to have any positive impact on educational programs,” Karp said.

Newark juniors feel nervous about the exit test

Starting in December, Newark Public Schools required all juniors to attend a Saturday class to prepare for the exam this week. On average, Newark students scored 706 for the English Language Arts portion and 726 for math on the trial exit exam last year — 44 points below the passing score for English and 24 points below the score for math.

Yamia Bermudez, a junior at University High School, said she attended two Saturday sessions and found them “somewhat helpful” in preparing her for the exit test. During the sessions, students worked on a mock test and reviewed questions as a group in order to get a feel for what they could expect, Bermudez said.

But after taking the first two sections of the English portion of the test this week, Bermudez said the reading passages were boring and the questions confusing.

“When it was over, everybody was like: That was so confusing, it was so long, like what were they talking about?” said Bermudez about her peers who shared their thoughts after testing on Monday.

This year, the exam is broken down into three, 90-minute sections for English and Language Arts and two 90-minute sections for math. The test is computer-based, and students answer questions on their Chromebooks. Results will be available before the end of the school year in June, according to the district’s letter to parents.

Bermudez said she feels nervous about her performance on the test so far, but knows she can take an alternative test if she doesn’t pass.

The state offers a long list of substitute assessments for students who do not pass, such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the SAT, and ACT, among others.

Ultimately, Bermudez said she is confident in the skills she’s learned but could do without another timed test.

“When it comes to tests, I get stressed, I always overthink, and I end up doing worse than I would have had I just taken the time to calm down,” she said. “But for a state test, you don’t really have time to calm yourself down, you have 90 or 60 minutes to get it done.”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Racist slurs, parent pleas: Emails reveal long battle to address harassment at Newark’s Global Studies

2023-03-08T19:13:10+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free Newark newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Students from the Newark School of Global Studies endured months of racial harassment and abuse before they pleaded for help to the school board in November.

One student described being called a “smart chimpanzee” in his English class. Another told board members how he and his friends have been called “the n-word, a monkey, a slave, a caricature.”

Board members listened intently to students describe microaggressions and racial slurs, and Superintendent Roger León promised students he would fix the problems. But this was not the first time some board members and León had heard about the racial tensions at the school.

Emails obtained by Chalkbeat Newark show that school and district leaders had known about the issues since at least May of last year. Early last fall, emails show, a parent repeatedly reached out to León, principal Nelson Ruiz, vice principal Hoda Abdelwahab, and other school leaders begging for an end to the ongoing harassment and demanding stronger consequences for students who used derogatory language.

Even since that November meeting, some students said they were called racial slurs in the hallway and heard other students make jokes about blackface and lynchings. Most recently, a student did not face any consequences after threatening to “rip off and step on” the hijab of two teachers in January, according to an interview with teachers.

Several students transferred mid-year, including the Black Student Union president and the daughter of school board president Dawn Haynes, and at least one teacher resigned. Some students have also reported having issues getting their transfers approved and battling with guidance counselors for transcripts in January.

The district’s spokesperson, Nancy Deering, Ruiz, and Abdelwahab did not respond to emailed questions about the transfers and issues at Global Studies.

The district launched a corrective action plan at the school, but details about the plan have not been shared with the public despite multiple emails for information from Chalkbeat Newark.

The situation also garnered attention from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who met with students in December and is hosting a town hall event on March 8 to discuss unity among Black and brown communities.

Although district and school leaders met on several occasions in recent months, students, staff, and parents grew increasingly frustrated at what seemed to be an initial lack of response or sense of urgency, with at least one parent calling for the removal of Ruiz.

The problems at Global Studies — and the way school and district leaders handled the situation — reveal shortcomings in how Newark handled this racial harassment and how that affected the emotional well-being of students.

“Can you imagine,” one parent wrote in an Oct. 30, 2022 email to León, board member A’dorian Murray-Thomas, and the district’s student life office, “walking into a classroom or school feeling ostracized or made to feel less than because of the color of your skin?”

Incidents of racist harassment fester

Three years ago, Global Studies welcomed its first freshman class of 114 ninth graders, promising students a global perspective and a chance to study different cultures. But last year, racial tensions at the campus, where 70% of students are Latino and 26% are Black, began to surface.

In May, Haynes’ daughter — a Black and Muslim student — was called a terrorist and the “n-word” in the hallway, according to interviews with students and teachers at the high school.

The student accused of using the racial slur was suspended for three days, according to a May 25, 2022 email from the parent of the student. The parent, whose name is redacted in the email, had asked Ruiz for another meeting to “clarify this whole situation.”

“I honestly don’t think that it’s fair for my son to be suspended 3 days and skip class for an allegation that might not be true,” the email read. “And it’s her word against his.”

Haynes’ daughter, a “super honor roll” student and the former student body secretary, did not feel comfortable continuing her education at the school and transferred out, Haynes told Chalkbeat in December.

Racial tensions on campus continued to build. In October 2022, another student who later transferred was called a “smart chimpanzee” during his English class. The student’s mother found out nearly two weeks later, filed a harassment, intimidation, and bullying report, and met with Ruiz, two department chairs, and two teachers about the incident, according to an email.

Over the next month, León received numerous concerned emails from the parent about the situation at Global Studies:

Oct. 29, 2022: “My son was called a racial and derogatory remark … No one reached out to me or spoke with my son!”

Nov. 3, 2022: Ruiz “spoke with no sense of urgency! He even paused for a minute to check his cell phone!”

Nov. 3 2022: “Mr. Ruiz apologized to my son, as well as myself, nice words … but no action plan, no sense of concern or validation. I’m very disappointed as a Black mother, especially in these critical times that we live in.”

At the November board meeting, Black Student Union members and a parent spoke out about the harassment and called for stronger policies to prevent and discipline students who engage in racism.

The next day, León visited the school to speak with students in the Black Student Union in an effort to ease tensions, according to a Dec. 3, 2022 email from a parent.

But according to the email, the superintendent asked a student who had been called a racial slur in his English class if he would like a basketball team at the school.

“How fitting, let’s ask the Black students who were called monkeys to do what Black students are always asked to do, play sports, perform,” the parent whose name was redacted, wrote in the email, which was sent to León, U.S. Senator Cory Booker, and district staff.

As frustration with the school and district response mounted, parents started demanding changes; at least one asked for Ruiz to be removed as principal.

The parent also reached out to State Sen. M. Teresa Ruiz, the senate majority leader who represents Newark, asking for her help and describing concerns for her son.

“My son has been traumatized and I’m worried for his well-being,” wrote the parent, whose name was redacted in a Dec. 4, 2022 email to the state senator and district staff.

Teresa Ruiz’s office said they forwarded the email to the district and were told the matter was addressed.

“Our office was notified by the school district that the parent was contacted and the matter was resolved,” according to an emailed statement to Chalkbeat, which also noted the state senator’s concern “anytime claims of harassment are raised.”

Newark works to address racial tensions

In early December, more than seven months after racist harassment on campus was first reported to district leaders, board members started taking action.

School and district leaders met with students in November and December. The situation also garnered attention from Baraka, who met with students separately in December to discuss the allegations.

But the meetings didn’t assuage all of the students’ concerns. By January, at least five more students, including the school’s Black Student Union founder, requested transfers to another district school, according to student comments during the January school board meeting.

Newark Public Schools denied a Chalkbeat Newark public records request for the number of students who transferred out of Newark School of Global Studies during the previous and current school years.

The students’ anger spilled over at the January school board meeting, where former and current students expressed dissatisfaction with how their reports of racist harassment were handled.

Former Global Studies student Yamia Bermudez said León met with students on Jan. 3 and told them that “if they didn’t like the way the school was run, they could leave.”

“The speech didn’t feel like it had any empathy and it gave very much, ‘if you don’t like it, then go home,’” said Bermudez during the meeting.

Allen, a former junior and student body president at the school, told board members he felt manipulated into working with them to solve the problems at the school.

“I won’t waste my breath asking any of you for anything, but I will leave you with this. I know no one in this room is brave enough to do what actually needs to be done,” Allen said during the meeting.

Allen requested a transfer in January but his request wasn’t granted until he refused to go back to school and his parents emailed Ruiz, Abdelwahab, and León about it, he said. Allen also said “a vast amount of students” were lined up outside of the guidance counselors’ offices the day after León said students who were unhappy with the school response could transfer.

Karlene Grant, a junior at the high school, also told board members of the obstacles she faced when trying to transfer.

“I have asked to transfer and have been told by guidance counselors multiple times you cannot transfer or if you leave, how would that make us feel?” she said.

Murray-Thomas apologized to the students after they spoke and said changes were happening but not “at the rate that it needs to happen.”

Emails also show two parents requesting transfers for their children in December and January. One of those parents emailed León and the nine board members after experiencing trouble with her daughter’s transfer. She said she submitted the form four times online but had not heard back from the district or school staff.

“The staff keeps saying that they have not received the transfer my daughter had a breakdown in the school and she is very unhappy every day I feel she’s being punished, neglected and discriminated,” read a Jan. 21 email to León and the nine board members from a parent whose name was redacted.

In the email, the parent pleaded: “I am crying out for help to make sure my daughter receives a fair education.”

‘I was advised by my therapist to leave’

At the start of February, the school kicked off Black History Month not with the remembrance of African American contributions, but instead with celebrations of Lunar New Year, which began on Jan. 22 and ended on Feb. 5.

Then-Black Student Union advisor and pre-AP English teacher Tammy Davis saw it as just another “culturally insensitive” slight to the Black students at the school. For months, she said, she had reached out to the principal and administrators about the “oppressive environment,” confrontations that she said resulted in mistreatment. By February, she was ready to leave.

On Feb. 13, Davis emailed her resignation to León and included a letter from her therapist describing the emotional toll she was enduring due to the situation.

“I was advised by my therapist to leave because I had a session where I was essentially infuriated and she didn’t feel like it would be good for me to go back,” said Davis about a therapy session in early February.

Within 30 minutes of receiving her emailed resignation, León released her from her role immediately, she said.

“He didn’t say anything about it or say I’m sorry that these things happen. We need to have an emergency meeting. There was nothing,” said Davis about León’s reaction to her resignation.

Davis also said she filed complaints about the harassment with the district’s human resource and affirmative action offices.

“I’m not giving up on this,” Davis said. “They will be held accountable for what they’ve done to not only the students but to us as professionals.”

At the end of February, according to the school’s Facebook page, Global Studies students celebrated the culture by presenting poems at a school assembly and participating in a performance where they “showcased their talents connected to Black History Month.”

Photos show students of all colors — smiling, listening to speakers, posing arm-in-arm. Among those pictured: Global Studies principal Ruiz, who is seen on stage dancing.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Incoming Newark high school students may take new entrance test

2023-01-11T11:00:00+00:00

Eighth graders seeking admission into Newark’s high schools could take a new entrance exam this year.

During last month’s Newark Board of Education meeting, the board approved a $52,260 contract to acquire the Stanford Achievement Test, or SAT10, and use it as the Newark Enrollment High School Entrance Exam. This year, incoming high schoolers are required to take their admissions test in early February but the district has not clarified if the new entrance exam will be given to students this year.

The contract term is for Jan. 12 through Dec. 31, 2023.

Rochanda Jackson, the district’s executive director of policy, planning, evaluation, and testing, reviewed and approved the contract but did not respond to emails from Chalkbeat Newark asking when the new test will be implemented or how schools will use the exam results in upcoming admissions decisions for the 2023-24 school year. Newark Board of Education members and spokesperson Nancy Deering also did not respond to emails.

High school admission exams are typically used to assess students in subjects such as math and reading and are often used to determine student placement in private or specialized schools. All Newark eighth graders are set to take an entrance exam next month, whether or not they applied to any magnet schools, but it is unclear if the new entrance exam will also assess placement for students hoping to get into a magnet school.

In 2020, students looking to get into one of Newark’s six magnet high schools took the PreACT from test maker, ACT Inc. Some of the schools previously administered their own entrance exams, which the district eliminated several years ago.

Superintendent Roger León has shared little about the district’s high school entrance exam, and during board meetings in the fall, only noted the dates for the test next month.

Current Newark eighth grade students are slated to take a high school admissions test during the school day at their current schools on Feb. 10, with non-Newark students scheduled for testing on Feb. 11, according to the Newark Enrolls website. Additional testing days will be held on Feb. 17 for Newark eighth graders and Feb. 18 for non-Newark students. School match letters will be sent on April 18 to all Newark students.

But neither the district’s website nor its Newark Enrolls enrollment guidebook show how the high school admission exam will be used to weigh enrollment decisions for students vying for a spot in Newark’s traditional or magnet high schools.

According to the owner of the test, Canada-based company Multi Health Systems Inc., or MHS, the SAT10 was “independently developed to give schools a tool to measure students’ achievement” in math, reading, environment, science, and social science at different stages throughout the school year. Texas-based company NCS Pearson, Inc. formerly owned the test before transferring ownership to MHS in February 2022.

“The SAT10 was developed with the intention of providing educators with a tool to assess student progress toward academic standards in kindergarten-12th grade,” Jenni Pitkanen, chief product officer for MHS, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat Newark. “Educators who administer the SAT10 use the results in different ways as suits their particular needs as part of an overall assessment process.”

The SAT10 consists of questions on reading and comprehension, sound and letters, mathematics, language, spelling, listening comprehension, science, and social science. Each test is scored electronically with one point given for each correct answer and students’ raw scores are converted to different scores that provide “equitable comparison” across different groups, Pitkanen said.

Electronic, booklet, and scantron options are available for the SAT10 test, and results are provided to the school district once testing and review have been completed, Pitkanen said, adding that how the results are used is a local decision.

“More generally, achievement tests are used to identify student strengths and needs in a given grade, leading to the effective placement and instructional planning,” Pitkanen said.

During the 2021-22 school year, 29%, or roughly 11,100, Newark students were enrolled in district high schools, according to Newark Enrolls data.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark will launch monthly bus pass program for high school students in 2023

2022-11-29T22:16:51+00:00

Newark high school students will receive a monthly bus pass instead of a daily bus ticket starting in January 2023 as part of a trial run program with NJ Transit, district officials said during November’s board of education meeting.

The new pilot program, running from January until the end of June, will provide all high school students with a monthly bus pass to use outside of school, as well as for transportation to and from school. Currently, the district provides single-use bus tickets to cover trips to and from school for students who live a certain distance from campus.

“I’m pretty excited about that bus pass,” said board president Dawn Hayes during last week’s board meeting. “I know as a mom of two high school students, that’s going to come in handy.”

Under New Jersey law, the district is required to provide transportation to and from school for elementary school students who live more than 2 miles from their public school and for high school students who live more than 2.5 miles from their school. Like other cities, Newark relies on public transportation systems such as NJ Transit to take students to school.

The new initiative will launch on Jan. 3, 2023 for eligible high school students. They will receive a physical or electronic monthly bus card consistent with the zone in which they currently travel to and from school, board members said. District officials will monitor the trial run and assess the program at the end of June. The exact cost of the new program, and any savings to the district, are unclear.

During their meeting last Tuesday, school board members celebrated the upcoming launch of the program, which is the result of years of negotiations between Newark Public Schools and NJ Transit to find an alternative to the current system of single-use tickets. Details about the program were first announced in February 2020 when district officials said they would roll out the monthly bus pass initiative for students at six schools. At that time, the bus passes would not have covered evening or weekend trips but the program was put on pause due to the pandemic.

“I don’t know if people know the magnitude of the bus passes,” said board member Flohisha Johnson-Hill during the meeting last week. “It’s really awesome that kids are going to be able to use it on the weekend for travel, to go to work, or different activities after school.”

District spokesperson Nancy Deering did not respond to a request for comment about the program.

More than 14,000 Newark students were eligible for bus tickets in October and another 4,700 students were transported via a school vehicle, according to committee reports. Before the new program, eligible students received single-use bus tickets on a monthly basis from their school but that caused a strain on students, who are responsible for keeping track of their tickets. Students with disabilities are provided transportation through school buses regardless of their home address, according to the office of special education.

“I’m really excited for this,” board member A’dorian Murray-Thomas said at the meeting.

In August, Newark Superintendent Roger León and the board of education spent just over $7 million on a contract with 20 transportation companies to service 126 routes to schools. During the November board meeting, the board approved a more than $6 million contract with 22 transportation companies to service 101 routes, with a 10% route modification allowance, for the 2023-24 school year.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Community Street Team awarded $1 million federal grant to support school safety

2022-10-04T22:28:34+00:00

The Department of Justice awarded $1 million this week to the Newark Community Street Team (NCST) to continue its prevention work in schools. The award is part of a federal initiative to prevent school violence in K-12 schools.

The NCST will partner with the Newark Opportunity Youth Network (NOYN) to hire and deploy a team of interventionists to support student mental health and identify at-risk students at its LEAD Charter School, an alternative high school for students who had previously dropped out of high school, often amid turmoil outside of school.

The funding is part of the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s initiative to support the work of county and local organizations in reducing violent crime in and around schools. The nonprofits are among 82 award recipients that received nearly $87 million in combined federal funds to support school and student safety.

“When you invest on the front end of things, you prevent negative outcomes,” said Daniel Croson, chief of staff for the Newark Opportunity Youth Network. “We’re providing help for students to make sure they are supported as a person, not just as a statistic.”

Last year, educators reported a surge in behavior challenges as students readjusted to school while still coping with pandemic stress and uncertainty. Across the country, many schools are providing mental health services to address the effects of the pandemic on students and provide support for trauma and at-risk students. Additionally, schools and community leaders are rallying to end gun violence where students experience it most.

During the 2019–20 school year, 77% of public schools reported one or more incidents of crime, amounting to 1.4 million crimes nationwide during that school year. In Newark, students also face violence in their neighborhoods, prompting local groups like NCST to step in to help. NCST helps address the underlying causes of violent behavior and shields students from violent acts through initiatives like its Safe Passage program, which hires community members to patrol the routes students take to and from school.

“Thanks to this funding, we expect Training and Interventionist Navigators to be working in the schools by mid-2023,” wrote Solomon Middleton-Williams, NCST’s deputy director. “They will identify students at risk, create a safety plan and refer students to NCST’s Trauma Recovery Center if needed.”

Through the grant, NCST will work to hire and provide new staff, mental health and first aid training, school climate assessments, activities, and in-depth violence prevention and intervention for NOYN’s LEAD Charter School. NCST will also support the school’s existing safety plan and provide its own expertise in outreach, intervention, and trauma-informed work.

Newark is also looking at ways to fund more anti-violence programs throughout the community. In March, Mayor Ras Baraka awarded NCST, NOYN, and six other community-based organizations a $1 million grant as part of its violence reduction initiative through the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. The initiative supports its efforts to help youth and adults address trauma, health disparities, and social factors, specifically violence, as a public health issue heightened by the pandemic.

Over the summer, residents saw an increase in violence in their communities prompting local groups like the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition and NCST to rally for peace in July.

In June, a 17-year-old teen was arrested in connection with a drive-by shooting that injured nine people, including another teenager. In July, two men were killed and seven people were injured in five weekend shootings that occurred over a 25-hour period in Newark, according to reports by NJ.com.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark public school teachers mask up to welcome students hoping for a smooth year

2022-09-06T16:28:40+00:00

Before Elijah Lee walked out to the car for his first day as a Central High School freshman, he said a prayer with his mom, Jasmin Lee Phillips, who kept her nerves inside.

They prayed for safety on the 14-year-old’s big day and for a good school year. Lee Phillips has been worried about her son, who has autism, starting high school but Elijah’s optimism and excitement put her at ease.

“I just have to let him go,” said Lee Phillips, who worked at her son’s middle school when he attended last year. “I’m not going to worry about anything, I’m going to let him have his day.”

By the time Elijah got to school, on a rainy Tuesday morning, he was grinning from ear to ear, excited to meet his teachers and classmates.

It’s a big transition for any teen, but especially for Elijah.

“I’m excited!” said Elijah, as he posed for a picture outside of the school building.

Elijah Lee, an incoming freshman at Central High School, poses for a picture on his first day of school. Elijah, who has autism, is excited to attend a new school.

Elijah joins more than 38,000 students who returned to Newark Public Schools this morning – some sporting new backpacks but all wearing face masks, a district mandate that NPS officials say comes from the city’s health department.

The district’s remaining COVID-19 preventative measures, including temperature checks, health screenings, and weekly testing for the virus were dropped this school year, according to Superintendent Roger León, who announced the new measures at a board meeting last month. COVID testing for unvaccinated staff is no longer required on a weekly basis following an executive order signed by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy last month, León added.

Yet some Newark parents weren’t too concerned about COVID this year. Parents such as Lee Phillips just felt happy to have their children return to a structured school schedule and daily social interactions.

At Central, dozens of teens rushed to the 18th Avenue entrance Tuesday morning as the rain trickled down their backpacks. Some hugged their parents goodbye while others just waved as they ran up the stairs. At the 17th Avenue entrance of the school, students waited in a line outside the school’s doors.

Siki Adebara, also a parent of a freshman at Central, said she felt “a mix of emotions” about her son’s first day. As she walked down the stairs of the school, she saw Elijah and leaned in to hug him and his mom. Her son, already inside the school, was Elijah’s classmate last year.

Elijah Lee and his mom, Jasmin Lee Phillips, pose for a picture on the first day of school for Newark students.

Adebara’s only concern was that she was still waiting on the school to give her a bus assignment for her son. Lee Phillips hadn’t received one for her son either as of Tuesday morning.

“The school said they would send it to us but we haven’t gotten anything yet,” Adebara said.

A block away from Central, KIPP Thrive students ran out of cars and into the entrance of that school as the rain picked up shortly after 8:00 a.m. Once their kids waved goodbye to them, parents drove out of the busy intersection on 18th Avenue and Livingston Street. Crossing guards at both schools helped kids cross the street and avoid drivers eager to leave the area.

Last year, Newark and other cities in New Jersey struggled to fill crossing guard positions. Currently, the city is at 72% of its budgetary allocation for school crossing guards with an additional 27 in the hiring process, according to Sharonda Morris, Newark Police deputy director of operations. Assuming that all 27 prospective applicants are hired, the department will bump up to 92%, Morris added.

Newark had 11 openings in a force of 126 crossing guards, according to the city police department last October.

This year, school officials will not only have to deal with the lingering effects of the pandemic but also have to tackle some of the district’s most pressing issues including attendance rates, support for students with disabilities, and teacher and student mental health. Even though in-person learning resumed last fall, teachers will continue to focus on academic progress and learning loss due to the pandemic.

Ahead of the school year, the district hired 600 new teachers arriving from other districts and starting out in the profession, according to León in an interview with ABC7. In June, the district announced the appointment of 10 new principals across district high schools. An additional two were appointed over the summer to Science Park High School and Newark Vocational High School and replaced two first-year principals.

Students walk up the stairs at Central High School on the first day of school for Newark Public Schools.

Newark has struggled to hire enough teachers and other educators in the past, as districts nationwide contend with staffing shortages. By the end of March, Superintendent Roger León said, there were 115 instructional openings. During a board meeting last month, León said there were 75 vacancies across the district with numbers fluctuating every day.

A teacher at Thirteenth Avenue Elementary School who preferred to remain unnamed said she felt nervous ahead of the first day of school because of the experiences she went through last year. The teacher said understaffing and a lack of resources were a problem at the school.

Last week, district officials held their annual convocation to welcome teachers and staff to Newark ahead of the school year. León thanked teachers for their hard work during the pandemic before he highlighted some of the district’s accomplishments this year, including an increase in student enrollment, student attendance, scholarship awards, and graduation rates.

“I really appreciate all of you for your hard work,” said León during the convocation. The impact of your work is realized every day in our schools by our students who have a safe, nutritious, and healthy learning environment with the resources needed to be successful.”

The district did not respond to comment on Tuesday morning.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newly appointed Science Park principal faces allegations in ongoing discrimination lawsuit

2022-09-01T17:46:22+00:00

The newly appointed principal at Science Park High School is facing allegations in an ongoing lawsuit of discrimination, making racist comments, and creating a hostile and retaliatory work environment at a previous Newark school.

In the lawsuit filed in 2019, Marcia Harris, then a first grade teacher at Sussex Avenue School, claims Darleen Gearhart, a former principal at the elementary school, harassed and retaliated against her for more than a year while she worked under her leadership. Christopher Constantino, a former administrator at the same school, is also named in the lawsuit.

NPS spokesperson Nancy Deering said the district does not comment on pending litigation. Gearhart and Constantino did not respond to requests for a comment on the ongoing case.

Gearhart, who was appointed as Science Park principal over the summer, is accused in the lawsuit of making “numerous racist comments” in front of Harris, other Sussex Avenue School employees, and students at the elementary school. The lawsuit also alleges Gearhart referred to the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song often called the Black national anthem, as “disrespectful” on at least one occasion.

David Michelson, one of the attorneys representing Harris in the case, called Gearhart’s appointment to Science Park “alarming.” Harris, an NPS teacher since 2013, was not available to comment due to her pending case.

Harris “feels like the district didn’t take what happened seriously and that is really the alarming part of all of this,” Michelson said. “Gearhart was just moved to another school. Everything was swept under the rug and they have never really acknowledged anything that happened when she was running that school.”

Gearhart, who is white, replaced former principal Kycied Zahir, who is Black. According to 2019 district data, 47% of Science Park students identify as Hispanic and 34% as Black.

Gearhart’s appointment comes amid concerns over principal turnover in the district after first-year predecessors were ousted from their positions. It also comes as the departure of vice principals and leadership of color raises questions about district officials’ stated goal of elevating people of color to leadership positions, especially men. Gearhart also faces challenges in the highly selective magnet school that has been accused of underenrolling Black students.

“The lawsuit is, at this point, preparing to go in front of the judge and then go to trial,” Michelson added.

In the allegations against Constantino, the lawsuit states he began harassing Harris in September 2017. He would enter Harris’s classroom without any work-related purpose “to taunt and harass her,” according to the lawsuit, which says at least one teacher’s aide witnessed the physical and verbal harassment. When Harris complained about Constantino, he allegedly became more aggressive, the suit states.

On Sept. 28, 2018, Constantino allegedly approached Harris “in a confrontational manner,” got into her face, and threatened, “Are you ready to rumble?” the lawsuit says. Harris claims she was then retaliated against with a “Letter of Warning – Insubordination” because she used “district email during the instructional time” to inform superiors about the alleged threat.

Shortly after, Harris went on family and medical leave and, when she returned, her assigned classroom aides were never replaced, the lawsuit read. Gearhart further retaliated against Harris by leaving her alone to supervise a room of 14 children, some as young as 3, in violation of New Jersey laws on staff-to-child ratios, according to the lawsuit.

“Harris still finds it very troubling that when she complained that students weren’t getting the best services that they could be getting, the response from the Gearhart administration was to bully and intimidate and punish her for speaking off rather than to be responsive to her concerns,” Michelson said.

The district’s affirmative action officer Keith Barton became involved in the situation but ultimately directed Gearhart to mediate the situation, the lawsuit claims. In February 2019, Gearhart, assistant superintendent Kathy Duke-Jackson, and Harris held an impromptu meeting to alleviate tensions between Gearhart and Harris to no avail, the lawsuit states.

After speaking with the Newark teachers union, Harris began to send daily emails to Gearhart and Duke-Jackson about having no aides in her classroom but ultimately, Gearhart told her to only email her about the matter, the lawsuit states.

In July 2019, Harris was reassigned from a preschool teacher to a first grade teacher. She is still employed by NPS as a teacher. Her lawsuit is pending a hearing with a judge.

“For the past several years, they moved her to a different grade level and she expressed that she didn’t want to be teaching that,” Michelson said. “The person who made the decision to do that was Gearhart.”

In addition to alleging a hostile work environment, Harris is claiming violations of New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination and the state’s Conscientious Employee Protection Act, also known as the whistleblower law.

Correction: Sep. 2, 2022: A previous version of this story said Gearhart, who is white, replaced former Science Park principal Angela Mincy, who is Black. Gearhart replaced Kycied Zahir, not Mincy.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org

Former Newark elementary school principals take top roles at Science Park, Vocational

2022-08-12T21:31:01+00:00

Newly appointed principals at Science Park High School and Newark Vocational High School, both named over the summer by the Newark Board of Education, sent out welcome letters to parents this week to announce their arrival and set the stage for the year.

The new arrivals come amid concerns over principal turnover in the district after their first-year predecessors were ousted from their positions. But parents aren’t sure if the reshuffling will help address some of the long-standing issues affecting both high schools.

“I’m just tired of meeting new principals,” said Doug Freeman, whose son is a senior at Newark Vocational. “The first two didn’t have a real opportunity to bring their vision to life.”

Both high schools are set to face more challenges following a year of learning disruptions due to COVID, student mental health, and staff burnout. The departure of the former principals has also sparked questions over the district’s support given to first-year staff.

Additionally, the departure of vice principals and leadership of color raises questions about district officials’ stated goal of elevating people of color to leadership positions, especially men. Both incoming principals are white women who are replacing people of color.

Karisa DeSantis is the new principal at Newark Vocational replacing Lucinda Eason, a former vice principal at two Newark high schools who started in the fall of last year. DeSantis, a former principal at Elliot Street School and vice principal at Rafael Hernandez School of the Performing Arts, will have to address the high schools’ struggle with discipline, violence, and absenteeism, and concerns over racial representation.

“The school used to be a family-friendly environment,” Freeman said. “You barely needed security and there’s security on the outside corners because they keep making these changes.”

Marcus Allen, president of the Parent Teacher Student Organization at Newark Vocational, is concerned about the continuous turnover at the high school. He’s hoping to meet with DeSantis in the coming weeks but fears for his son’s experience in school.

“Now, he doesn’t trust the experience or trust that he will have the experience he was initially promised because there have been so many changes,” Allen said.

Darleen Gearhart takes the principal’s role at Science Park High School replacing Angela Mincy, who left in 2021 to take the helm at Marion P. Thomas Charter School. Gearhart also faces challenges in the highly selective magnet school that has been accused of under-enrolling Black students.

The district, DeSantis, and Gearhart did not respond to requests for comment.

The district plans to spend $35 million to make urgently needed fixes to buildings, including the future site of Newark Vocational High School.

In a letter to parents on Thursday. DeSantis laid out COVID and safety protocols for the year along with the announcement of a new vice principal, Peter Ramos, and a new department chair, Patrick Malpass. She brings 20 years of experience as an educator working in urban districts in New York, Florida, and New Jersey. In July, DeSantis sent out a survey to parents to gauge concerns, pointing to interest in addressing the school’s issues.

On Monday, Gearhart addressed Science Park parents in a letter detailing her plans for the upcoming year. The former Sussex Avenue School principal brings more than 28 years of experience working in Newark Public Schools. She started her career as a math teacher at Weequahic High School, but will face concerns over discipline at Science Park after several fights broke out and multiple bomb threats were reported last year.

Science Park is the third high school in the past year to lose a Black male principal and Gearhart will have to address concerns about diversity and racial representation.

“As your new school principal, I believe it’s important that I understand both your needs as a parent and the aspirations you have for your child,” said Gearhart in a letter to parents this week.

Teacher retention and principal experience are key factors of school stability. Principals who have led their first school for five or more years hire significantly more teachers who stay at the school, according to a study released in May. At a time when many school districts are facing a teacher shortage, principal turnover could cause serious strains on students and educators.

Last month, district officials also approved 13 internal leadership promotions, two outside appointments for vice principal positions, and four resignations of top administrators.

Allen and Freeman are hoping to develop a working relationship with their new principals as they prepare their children for the first day of school next month.

“I want to know now what to expect,” Freeman said. “Morale has been very low.”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org

‘Love first, then school’: Amid traumas, this N.J. teacher fosters a supportive classroom

2022-03-16T10:05:00+00:00

Talena Lachelle Queen focuses on creating an atmosphere of love in her English writing class at Eastside High School Academy of Culinary Arts, Hospitality and Tourism in Paterson.

The teacher and poet says love looks like understanding, kindness, and support in the classroom, especially as her students returned to full-day, in-person instruction this academic year.

By establishing a welcoming environment, students feel comfortable “to confide in me and want to get higher grades because they know they are valuable,” said Queen, a Paterson native who attended a local performing arts high school.

“I got to see dancers have recitals, actors have plays, musicians have shows, and artists have exhibits,” Queen said. “The writers did not have that kind of public showcase of their talent like the other disciplines.”

So when in 2018 she was named the city’s first poet laureate by Mayor Andre Sayegh, she started the first annual Paterson Poetry Festival. The festival is intended to serve and support young emerging poets, she said.

Poetry vibrates throughout Paterson, the hometown of poet Allen Ginsberg and the setting of Williams Carlos Williams’ epic poem named after the city. The city was even at the center of the 2016 movie with its namesake, which followed the life of a fictional bus driver and poet named Paterson.

While the city is brimming with arts and culture, incidents of gun violence and homicides are also a reality. There was a record number of homicides in the city last year and the year before.

The educator didn’t have a straight path to teaching. She started out working in broadcast journalism until she took on her first teaching role in 1998 to run a grant-funded videography class at Passaic County Community College. After that, she ran a preschool and daycare in Seattle, earned her teaching certificate, returned to her hometown, and began teaching at Paterson Public Schools in 2016.

Queen shared with Chalkbeat how she helps her students heal from the last two years, why she loves teaching “science of writing,” and the advice she follows to this day.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment when you decided to become a teacher?

I decided I wanted to be a teacher in kindergarten, but I forgot about that dream while pursuing a career as a writer and journalist. I got back to my dream in time.

How do you bring your poetry background into your classroom?

I bring my poetry background into the whole district. Our superintendent has been supportive in a variety of ways. I host a poetry contest open to grades 3-12. The district is the primary contest source, though it’s open to all students. I host workshops for free. I visit campsites and afterschool programs. It is true that my favorite way is right in my own classroom. I tell the scholars to “make clay.” When they make clay, I can help them to mold their creations. A great thing happens: a scholar will “trust their pen and just write,” they’ll use a style that they think they’ve invented because they haven’t had intentional exposure to poetry, then I show them published poems in the style of their natural inclinations. I tell them the name of what they’ve made. It is incredibly empowering.

Sometimes what happens is the scholar is writing on a topic that makes me think of a published poet who writes on the same topic. I introduce them to the poet’s writing and, whenever possible, the poet.

We also write poetic responses to texts that are assigned, and we find ways to infuse poetry into the lessons. It helps that I teach language arts.

Following years of disrupted learning, is there anything you’re doing differently this school year to help students catch up and heal?

I am teaching with love. Love first, then school. Love looks like understanding, kind words, praise for even the smallest things. Addressing scholars as scholars and adding “Sir” and “Ma’am” to that address. Love creates sincere feelings of safety. It prompts scholars to confide in me and want to get higher grades because they know they are valuable. Healing, I think, starts with love.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

The science of writing — that is my favorite lesson to teach. I made up the title. Basically, I’m teaching the scholars that they ought to memorize, I mean really know, the parts of an essay, the parts of a paragraph, and what kind of paragraph goes where. If we can get that part, the science of it, out of the way, then we can have space to write our ideas without angst. I want them to know the parts like they know their math facts. I start the lesson out with math facts that everyone knows: What’s three times three? What’s eight times one? Of course, everyone knows, but they’re confused about why I am asking that question in my class. I acknowledge that there is a part of the writing process that makes them want to cry. The hands fly up. The heads nod in agreement and some even blurt out, “That’s me!” I love this lesson because it is validating and helps to grow scholars into writers.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom?

You know, we are all suffering from a list of traumas. I can barely talk about it without clearing the tears from my cheeks. I think we share these traumas with the nation, but it seems to me that the violence in our communities, that some people only read about, is in our neighborhoods. Our scholars see the street memorials every day. They know the people who are shot. They know the shooters. They see the stains on the grounds, they hear the stories, they know the stories and they carry the stories around with them inside their bodies. I think our scholars are becoming numb. They are escaping to handheld devices and virtual locations.

Let’s add on to the gun violence, the bomb threats, COVID-19, food insecurity, poverty, and the list goes on. The most important thing that I do in my classroom is give scholars a reason to smile and make them feel loved. Love makes the lessons possible.

Tell us about your own experience with school and how it affects your work today.

I had all the best teachers. They were creative, parental, really amazing teachers. I guess, I hadn’t thought of this before now, that my relationship with my teachers is the model for how I teach. They are grand-teachers now.

How do you approach news events in your classroom?

I often use a daily prompt that allows me to introduce news events. Some news events are imperative because we are all human and sharing the planet with each other. Some stories are worth the time. I don’t mind pausing the lesson plan to have a valuable discussion about the world we live in.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received and how have you put it into practice?

The best advice I ever received was from my mom. She said, “Well, you don’t know before you try.” I try. I try to make a difference. I try things that I haven’t tried before. I try things that have never been tried by anyone before. I have adopted the belief that “I don’t know yet.”

My classroom is better because of the “yet” mindset. It allows me to look at every problem as a puzzle that I am capable of solving.

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark, covering the city’s K-12 schools with a focus on English language learners. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.

‘You can’t keep my kids safe’: How violence shook a Newark high school, despite pleas for help

2022-01-11T15:39:00+00:00

The calls for help started the first week of classes at Malcolm X Shabazz High School.

Week one: The police were called about a fight at the Newark school, police records from this September show. Week two: an assault in progress. Week three: “criminal mischief.” Week four: an alleged sexual assault.

In October, a melee in the cafeteria sent the school into lockdown, according to students and videos. In a separate incident, two students punched and kicked a young woman as she cowered in a hallway, another video shows. In November, a gunman fired at students just after dismissal. Around the same time, a fight outside the school ended with a group of students stomping on a young man, a different video shows.

The vast majority of Shabazz students aren’t involved in the violence or disorder; they just want a safe, stable place to learn. But the chaos still has disrupted their classes, tarnished their school’s reputation, and exacted a psychic toll.

“I didn’t really feel safe,” said Alana Syphus, a ninth grader who transferred out of Shabazz this fall.

Across the country, educators reported a surge in behavior challenges this fall and unprecedented mental health needs as students readjusted to school while still coping with pandemic stress and uncertainty. Nearly 60% of parents in a recent poll called increased bullying and violence in school a major issue, and nearly 80% said they’re concerned about how schools are handling discipline issues.

But while the pandemic fueled such problems, it didn’t create them. During the 2019-20 school year at Shabazz High School, students were attacked in classrooms and the main office, according to interviews and incident reports. They were stabbed with pencils and hit by chairs. Both students and staffers had to seek medical treatment after altercations.

In private messages and at public meetings, parents and employees pleaded with officials to address the chaos at Shabazz. Yet it persisted.

“Innocent kids were getting harmed — inside the building, outside the building,” said Sharma Eagan, whose daughter is a Shabazz senior. “A lot of things were happening.”

The safety challenges are only one component of the crisis at Shabazz. In addition to violence, the school has struggled with instability, low academic achievement, and declining enrollment for many years and under multiple district leaders, according to a review of school data, incident reports, and police records, as well as interviews with more than 40 current and former officials, school employees, parents, and students.

Allowed to fester, the problems have intensified. Today, Shabazz’s enrollment has dwindled to 277 students — a third of what it was a decade ago. Its graduation rate fell to 62% last year, almost 20 percentage points below the district rate, and just 1 in 3 graduates headed to college in fall 2020.

During the 2019-20 school year, Shabazz’s suspension and serious-incident rates were many times higher than the district average, even exceeding rates at similar high schools.

This November, nearly 60% of Shabazz students were chronically absent — more than any other Newark high school.

District policies and a lack of urgent attention have entrenched the school’s troubles. Most notably, Newark’s two-tiered high school system steers the top-performing students into selective schools and young people with the greatest academic and social-emotional needs to comprehensive high schools such as Shabazz. Shabazz enrolls far more students with disabilities and behavior disorders and mid-year arrivals than any selective school serves.

The district superintendent, Roger León, promised to revitalize the city’s troubled high schools. Yet by opening even more selective schools, he may have deepened the hole that schools like Shabazz are struggling to climb out of. And while he was directly warned about the turmoil at Shabazz, even receiving videos of the violence, it continued under his watch.

A district spokesperson said all reported incidents at Shabazz were investigated and addressed, and the new principal who started this school year has taken steps to improve learning and safety at the school.

Across the country, no school has escaped COVID’s grip. Yet schools that struggled prior to the pandemic, often because they serve the neediest students with limited resources, were especially vulnerable to its disruptions.

In Newark, the failure to forcefully intervene at Shabazz and similarly troubled schools meant they were on shaky ground when the pandemic erupted. Because state and district officials allowed Shabazz to sink so low over so many years, it faces a far steeper path to recovery. And now, as the latest surge forces students back to remote learning, any fragile progress has been put on hold.

The pandemic might be the most dire emergency to beset the school — but it’s far from the first.

Brit Harley, who helped a nonprofit run an enrichment program in Shabazz for several years, said that long before COVID, successive superintendents allowed Shabazz to spiral out of control.

“I was always appalled at what seemed like the lack of oversight and care from the district,” she said recently. “Why was there not an SOS? How can this continue?”

In 1914, South Side High School opened in Newark’s South Ward. In 1972, the school was renamed in honor of Malcolm X Shabazz.

The making of Shabazz

Before it became Shabazz, the sprawling South Ward campus was home to South Side High School.

South Side opened in 1914 when Newark was a growing, majority-white industrial city. Within a few decades, the population transformed as waves of Black southerners moved North and racist housing policies drew white families to the suburbs but confined Black families to the inner city.

Between 1920 and 1970, Newark’s population shifted from 96% to 44% white, and from 4% to 54% Black. In 1972, South Side students led a push to rename the school in honor of the slain civil rights leader Malcolm X Shabazz.

South Side and Shabazz produced many accomplished alumni, including former Newark Mayor Sharpe James, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, and Grammy Award-winning singer Cissy Houston. The campus also has long boasted an acclaimed marching band and powerhouse football and basketball teams.

Shabazz boasts an acclaimed marching band.

Yet as deindustrialization, white flight, and government disinvestment wreaked havoc on Newark over many decades, Shabazz suffered too. Violence and poverty in the community seeped onto the campus. “It’s getting more and more difficult,” a Shabazz teacher told a reporter in 1993 as the school grappled with gangs and absenteeism.

The state seized control of Newark’s schools two years later, but little changed at Shabazz. In the 2000s, it spent seven consecutive years on the state’s struggling schools list due to poor performance.

In 2010, state observers found students roaming the halls during class and pulling fire alarms. The “adults in the building have lost control,” the observers wrote, calling it “a school in crisis.” Faulting the state-operated district for providing inadequate support, the reviewers recommended shutting down Shabazz and replacing it with small academies.

The state did not close Shabazz. “It would be like tearing down City Hall,” a former district official told Chalkbeat, citing its devoted alumni network. Instead, in 2011, Shabazz got its fourth new principal in as many years: a 27-year-old named Gemar Mills.

“The school was in disarray,” said Mills, who was promoted from vice principal. “Students were running the building however they wanted to.”

Mills and his team made aggressive changes. They cracked down on gang activity and fights. They replaced graffiti with murals. They held weekly pep rallies and posted online videos promoting “the new Shabazz,” symbolized by its feisty bulldog mascot.

“When we first got there, Shabazz was one of the worst schools in the country,” said Altarik White, an alum who joined Mills’ administrative team. “Through our efforts, we were able to bring back that bulldog bite.”

But when Mills left after just four years at the helm to help lead a national nonprofit, Shabazz began to backslide. The school had relied on a charismatic leader to overcome structural challenges that never went away.

The deep-rooted obstacles include pervasive poverty and crime surrounding Shabazz. In 2019, the poverty rate in the school’s ZIP code was five times the statewide average. Last year through Dec. 5, the local police precinct encountered more than 40% of the city’s shooting victims.

In addition, Shabazz and its feeder schools compete for students and funding with Newark’s many charter schools, which are concentrated in the South Ward. But arguably the greatest hindrance is the district’s own enrollment system, which ushers high-achieving students to selective high schools and the neediest students to Shabazz and the other comprehensive high schools.

This school year, about 31% of Shabazz students have disabilities — nearly twice the districtwide rate. Some parents of students with disabilities say district employees steered their children to the school. (The district spokesperson did not respond to that claim.)

“They said we had to go to Shabazz because he has special needs,” said Theresa Pringle, whose son enrolled at the school in 2018. “They guide you where they want to put you.”

In 2018, the most recent year when such data was available, Shabazz enrolled more students with emotional difficulties that affect learning and behavior than did any other district high school. And compared with selective high schools, a disproportionate share of students transfer to Shabazz during the school year, often because they were forced out of other schools due to discipline problems.

“Instead of having an alternative school, it’s been determined that Shabazz will be the school where all the behavior disorder kids will go,” said Donald Massey, a former Shabazz security guard and football coach.

A Shabazz 9th grader, whose name Chalkbeat is withholding, said the concentration of students with behavior challenges can impede on everyone’s learning.

“It creates a whole distraction for the school,” she said, “because now they bang on the doors, they run in the hallways.”

A 2011 study of Chicago schools found that schools serving more students with academic challenges were more likely to struggle with safety and order. In fact, students’ prior academic achievement had a bigger impact on school safety than crime and poverty in the surrounding area, the researchers found.

“We’re making some of these issues more challenging in the way we sort students” into schools, said David Johnson, a senior research analyst at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, who co-authored the report.

By sending so many students with academic and behavior challenges to Shabazz, the district created a combustible situation. By 2019, the situation had come to a head.

Chaos before the storm

Newark officials received repeated warnings that Shabazz was in trouble.

Theresa Pringle, whose son attended Shabazz, raised concerns about violence at the school during an August 2019 school board meeting.

In August 2019, Pringle stood up at a school board meeting to call attention to the chaos. The previous school year, Shabazz had reported 62 serious incidents, the majority involving violence. Its rate of incidents was six times the district average. East Side High School, with four times as many students as Shabazz, reported only 38 offenses.

“These incidents are taking place on school grounds during the school day and escalating into the community,” she said, “putting my son’s safety in imminent danger.”

As predicted, the violence resumed as soon as the 2019-20 school year started. On Sept. 12, a brawl broke out between periods, records show. The next morning, three students attacked a young man at a nearby bus stop. The student was rushed to a hospital.

In the following weeks, students fought or were attacked in stairwells, hallways, and locker rooms, according to incident reports and videos. One student flung a laptop at a classmate’s face, sending him to the hospital. On at least two occasions, security guards had to seek medical care, the reports show.

“It was constant fights breaking out,” said Naheim Dixson, who was a senior that school year.

Video screenshots show some of the violent incidents that Shabazz students recorded during the 2019-20 school year.

Students recorded the mayhem. In one video, the principal, wearing a black suit, rushes into a crowd of dozens to break up a fight. In another, a young woman pummels a student on the floor of the main office. In yet another, four young men assault a fifth student in a stairwell. “The incident could be described as extremely violent and predatory in nature,” the incident report reads.

León was aware of the violence. An alarmed Shabazz employee had been texting the Newark superintendent videos of the brutality, which León referenced at a staff meeting, according to an attendee.

On Feb. 5, 2020, the employee sent León a video of a young man entering a classroom, punching a seated student in the face, and chasing him into the hallway.

“I know in the past I’ve sent you multiple videos of the mayhem that’s going on in Shabazz,” the staffer wrote to León, according to a screenshot of the message shared with Chalkbeat. The employee wrote that León previously referred him to an assistant superintendent, whom the employee contacted, yet the violence continued.

“Mr. Leon if something isn’t done soon,” he wrote, “Shabazz will inevitably end up on the 5 o’clock news.”

The warning was eerily prescient. The next day, footage of several Shabazz basketball players attacking their coach appeared on the evening news. The story soon was picked up by the Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News. Newark’s mayor issued a statement and the assistant superintendent met with Shabazz families, but parents and staffers said they didn’t hear from León.

“When the big stuff goes down, he ain’t there,” said Eagan, the Shabazz parent.

León did not respond to questions about the specific steps he took to address the violence at Shabazz.

“Any and all reported incidents regarding Malcolm X Shabazz High School have been investigated, and appropriate action has been taken in response,” district spokesperson Nancy Deering said in a statement.

The disorder weighed on students. Erica Mends, who was in 12th grade that year, recalled students wandering the halls during class and teachers locking classroom doors to prevent intrusions.

“Every single day we go to school, we don’t know what to expect,” she said. “What is going to happen in the hallway? Who is going to say what to who?”

The chaos compounded other issues. Former students remember sitting in half-empty classrooms while their peers skipped school, and long-term substitutes replacing teachers who quit mid-year.

“It was a miserable, unhappy place to work,” said a teacher who left after the 2019-20 school year.

The violent videos were widely viewed, overshadowing students’ many accomplishments.

“Shabazz is filled with smart kids,” said Dixson, who graduated in 2020 and plans to join the military. But they were “outshined because everyone shined a light on the bad things.”

Pringle felt she had to remain vigilant while her son was at Shabazz. She documented 38 visits to the school to raise concerns about safety and other issues.

“Safety has to be addressed,” she said in an interview. “Parents should feel confident that when their children go to school, they won’t get a dreaded call that something has happened to your child.”

The violence at Shabazz continued through March 13, 2020, when a “male student decided to start hitting [a] female student” in the cafeteria, according to the incident report. That evening, the district announced it was shutting down school buildings due to the fast-spreading coronavirus.

The following year and a half of remote learning offered students a reprieve from the violence at Shabazz, even as the pandemic created new hardships.

In spring 2021, more than a year after dozens of documented fights and assaults at Shabazz, León replaced Principal Naseed Gifted, whom he had installed at the school three years earlier.

Superintendent Roger León spoke at a back-to-school event at Shabazz in 2018. In the background is Naseed Gifted, whom León appointed as principal.

That June, the Shabazz employee who had sent León videos of the violence followed up with the superintendent in an email, which Chalkbeat obtained. (The employee, who no longer works for the district, requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.)

In the June 24, 2021 email, he said he had warned León, another official, and school board members about the “mayhem” at Shabazz, but “my concerns [fell] on deaf ears.” Now, he said, he worried what would happen when Shabazz students, who already “had major social and emotional issues prior to the pandemic,” came back to a school with new administrators and staffers.

“Mr. Leon, I’m praying the district has a plan for the students who will be returning to a school that doesn’t remotely reflect the school they left,” he wrote. “I’m praying for these kids.”

A steep climb ahead

Schools nationwide reported a wave of fights and disruptions when in-person learning resumed this fall. The strain was heightened at Shabazz, where students returned to a new principal and a campus known for violence.

“At the beginning of the school year, it was a fight like every day,” said 10th grader Amiyah McClinton.

A current Shabazz employee, who asked to remain anonymous, described witnessing many of the same problems that plagued the school before the pandemic: terrible attendance, frequent fights, and students wandering the halls during class. Remote learning had also exacerbated academic and mental health challenges.

“You come in and want to teach content,” she said, “but you can’t without first putting out a zillion fires.”

Shanaya Thomas, whose two children attend Shabazz, was already worried about the violence when she learned that a man fired a gun outside the school on Nov. 30, narrowly missing two students. The next day, Thomas emailed Superintendent León to ask that he allow her son and daughter to learn from home.

“You can’t keep my kids safe, so why would I send them to school?” she said in an interview. Last month, she notified the district that she’d be homeschooling her children.

Shabazz students say fights were frequent at the beginning of the school year, but things have since calmed down.

Yet despite those persistent challenges, the school has made some progress. Students say they’ve been impressed with the new principal, Atiba Buckman, who previously led a district elementary school. Buckman meets regularly with the newly established student government, rewards students for good grades and attendance, and recently brought some calm to the school, they said.

“There used to be fights every day; now it’s like every other day,” said Imani, a ninth-grader who declined to give her last name. “It’s not perfect, but they’re doing their best.”

Even when the school has seemed in disarray, it still offered opportunities. Members of Shabazz’s Biogeochemistry Team compiled data that was included in a published study; in 2017, one of the student-researchers won a full ride to Harvard. Parents and students praise the school’s cosmetology and engineering programs, its partnerships with local universities, and its vaunted athletic teams and marching band, which recently performed at an event featuring former President Barack Obama.

“A lot of people were telling me, ‘You put him in there, he’s going to fail,’” said Yvonne Davis, whose son, Tariq, is a sophomore who’s in the marching band and on the honor roll. “Tariq proved them wrong; he’s doing really good.”

Yet the school remains in distress. Its enrollment is at an all-time low and its graduation rate, which trails far behind the district average, is lower than it was a decade ago. Only 31% of Shabazz graduates in 2020 entered college that fall. This November, 6 in 10 Shabazz students were chronically absent, an alarming trend that suggests students are falling further behind instead of making up ground lost during the pandemic.

The dire situation at Shabazz and other struggling high schools bears little resemblance to the vision laid out by León, a former selective school principal who became superintendent in 2018. Early in his tenure, he promised to make high school improvement a centerpiece of his agenda.

“We are changing the entire landscape of not only this school system, but of every single high school,” he proclaimed in 2019.

His marquee reform was reinvesting in vocational programs at the comprehensive high schools and recruiting businesses and universities to support their career training.

But he has been less clear about his plan to improve academics at those schools, which continue to lag far behind the selective high schools in every key measure. For example, when New Jersey last gave its annual exams in 2019, 63% of students at the selective Science Park High School were proficient in math, compared with just 3% of students at Shabazz.

At the same time, León has made changes that could hamstring the comprehensive schools. He eliminated a small school for struggling students, and sent them back to the traditional high schools. He opened several new selective high schools, and instituted a new entrance exam that the selective schools can use to admit top-performing students. Meanwhile, Shabazz and the other comprehensive schools must admit all who apply.

“If they don’t get accepted by any other school on their high school application, they get funneled to Shabazz,” said the current Shabazz employee. “Honestly, I think the district is setting up the school to fail.”

Deering, the district spokesperson, said León plans to eventually restore alternative education programs, which previous superintendents phased out. She added that all comprehensive high schools offer honors and Advanced Placement classes. (Only 9% of Shabazz students took AP classes last year, according to district data.)

“Many South Side and Shabazz graduates have gone on to successful careers, major leadership roles, and a rich history with a committed, dedicated, and supportive alumni association,” she said in a statement. “The new leadership at the school has instituted steps to address academics, culture, climate, and students’ social and emotional learning needs.”

Deering declined to provide details about the improvements. Principal Buckman and Newark school board President Dawn Haynes did not respond to multiple emails.

The district’s response to the acute challenges at Shabazz and similar schools remains a work in progress.

At the December school board meeting, members pressed León about concerningly high rates of absenteeism, serious incidents, and suspensions. León cited an ongoing review of the district’s discipline policies and a plan to train students to provide peer-to-peer counseling.

“A lot of really important work needs to happen,” León told the board, “to actually see these numbers on a downward spiral.”

While successive officials promise change, generations of young people encounter similar problems at Shabazz.

Malachi Muhammad graduated from Shabazz in 2016. Today, he’s part of a group that monitors students as they travel to and from school.

Malachi Muhammad, who graduated in 2016, remembers fights at the school and certain classes that offered little more than “babysitting.” It was known “for being a school that you get dumped into,” he said.

Today, Muhammad is a member of the Newark Community Street Team, whose staffers watch over students outside several designated schools, including Shabazz. Each day, the 24-year-old greets Shabazz students as they arrive and leave. He was talking to the two students the day the gunman exited a white car at dismissal and shot at them; Muhammad helped them escape.

Last month, he stood in the shadow of one of the school’s towering brick walls. It once featured a mural of Malcolm X Shabazz holding a page that read, “By any dreams necessary.” The mural was removed during repairs and never replaced.

Muhammad thought about the brilliance contained within those walls. Like young people everywhere, the students at Shabazz are capable of such greatness, he knew, if given the chance.

“A lot of these minds are revolutionary and they want something different,” he said. “But no one’s enabling it.”

This Newark high school counselor was discouraged from applying to college. She’s determined to help her students ‘achieve their dreams’

2021-12-01T15:00:00+00:00

As application deadlines for colleges and universities creep closer, the office of Newark high school counselor Stephanie Rivera-Beltre bustles with students seeking her advice on their essays and applications.

During this season, her workload can be overwhelming, and her days especially long. But walking her students through the college admissions process and encouraging them to pursue the futures they want is what brings happiness to Rivera-Beltre — and it’s what motivates her to keep going.

“It really does bring me so much joy,” said Rivera-Beltre, college and career match counselor at KIPP Newark Collegiate Academy. “It is so awesome to see how excited they are about applying to schools and programs.”

Perhaps her students’ excitement comes from having a counselor whom they can relate to and who understands them. Rivera-Beltre is a Brooklyn-native Afro-Latina with a Dominican and Puerto Rican background. She often tells her students about her own experience applying to colleges when she was in high school. Her guidance counselor’s discouraging feedback nearly crushed her dreams of pursuing higher education.

That experience, although devastating at the time, led her to the role she has today — her dream job. After getting her bachelor’s and master's degrees, she became a college preparatory counselor in Brooklyn, later moving into a teaching position for nearly 11 years. A few months ago, she joined the KIPP NJ team at Newark Collegiate Academy.

Rivera-Beltre recently shared with Chalkbeat how she overcame adversity, the advice she gives to her students, and what gives her hope at this moment.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What was your experience with school, and how does it affect your work today?

One of the reasons I decided to become a counselor was so that what happened to me in my senior year of high school would not happen to any of my students. While I was at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, I maintained an 85 average. When it came time to apply to colleges, my guidance counselor told me that average wouldn’t be good enough to get into a four-year university. She looked at me and said, “Sweetie, you are not getting into a four-year school.” I can’t even tell you how much I cried. I couldn’t believe that someone in her position would say that to a student.

Still determined, I decided to go to my best friend’s guidance counselor to work with him. His opinion was that an 85 average could get me places. I applied to 17 colleges and universities and got into 14. I went to Binghamton University, a State University of New York. I got my bachelor’s degree in sociology and master’s degree in social sciences with a concentration in student affairs administration.

I have never and will never discourage a student from applying to a school that they think they might not be able to get into. I share my story with them, so they know that it is possible to achieve their dreams.

What led you to become a college and career match counselor?

While at Binghamton, I joined the executive board of a program that mentored inner-city eighth graders and provided them with support needed to get into higher education or a promising path after high school. Making sure those students were able to see brown and Black people from the same places as them in leadership roles and environments like college campuses is what led me to this role in life. In all honesty, I know I was made for this. Helping people is my passion and helping to lead kids in a direction they never envisioned for themselves or thought they could even achieve is the fuel that makes me do what I do.

Among those you counsel, what issues do you see emerging after months of remote learning, social distancing, and social isolation?

The biggest issue I see is kids being able to focus, sit down, and actually get work done. Students were remote for 18 months, and you can see how It has affected them. They became used to not having people tell them what to do and when to do it. Most of the time, they were on their own schedule and did their own thing. I’ve noticed many students are behind in certain subjects. They’ve mentioned it’s not the same learning via computer as learning one-on-one or in front of a teacher. Many students needed that human interaction to learn and get through the day, but some definitely excelled during remote learning and taking classes at their own pace.

Students also seem to be using cell phones and mobile devices even more than they used to. During lunch, they’re spending more time on their phones instead of interacting with each other.

Several of my students are also seeking a virtual option for college. They tell me they like the flexibility that a virtual option could offer, allowing them to work and make money to provide for themselves and for their families.

What advice do you give to students to help them cope during this period? What about their parents?

The advice I can give students during this time is to keep pushing forward. None of us adults know what it’s like to be in high school during a pandemic, let alone everything else that’s going on in their neighborhoods and in their lives. I tell my kids that they are some of the strongest people I have ever met. I let them know that there is nothing they can’t do if they put their minds to it.

As for parents, as cliché as it may sound, I tell them that patience is key. They need to make sure that they have grace with themselves as well as grace with the children. Sit down with your children, ask them how their day went, how they’re doing, and just to share what’s going on in their lives. It’s important for families to know what’s going on so they can support each other in the best ways possible.

You spend your days trying to help your students. How do you wind down after a stressful day?

I begin every day with a 30-minute meditation at 5:30 a.m. It helps to balance me out and focus better throughout my day. I try my best not to bring any work home with me unless it’s absolutely necessary. This is why I get to work early, just after 7 a.m., and sometimes stay late after the day is over. With 70 students on my caseload, I meet with 10 daily — though it’s usually a lot more than that. When I get home, I relax by listening to music, cooking a nice dinner, and finding something good to watch on Netflix or Hulu. Sometimes I go to the gym for Zumba or spinning class or meet with friends for dinner and drinks. My absolute favorite day is Friday. I go home, put on my pajamas, and watch my favorite shows until about 10 p.m., when I go to sleep. It’s the best way to end a stressful week.

What gives you hope at this moment?

What gives me hope at this moment is seeing the faces of my students as they apply to colleges. The love and motivation that they give each other and the smiles on their faces after they submit their applications gives me hope today. This job is not easy by any means, but it is so rewarding. What gives me hope is these children living in the middle of a global pandemic and still wanting to make a difference in their lives. I’m living my dream right now. I get to help students see their potential and worth in a world that sometimes dismisses them. I know my kids will succeed because they have a strong support system at school.

Newark students may get ‘a seat at the table’ this year

2021-08-25T22:42:06+00:00

Newark high school students could get a seat at the table starting this fall thanks to a policy amendment written by Arts High School Class of 2020 graduate David Daughety.

On Thursday, the Board of Education will take a final vote on that amendment which, if passed, will establish the district’s first Student Governance Committee. The advisory committee would “give students an institutionalized role in shaping decisions that directly affect their education and educational experiences,” the policy reads.

“To some this might be a small thing, but to me and the students of Newark, this is monumental,” said Daughety, 19, a sophomore at Rutgers University-Newark studying political science and public affairs administration.

The proposed policy states that an elected district representative from each of the district’s 17 high schools and each grade level will comprise the committee. Some newer high schools only have a ninth grade at the moment, and so they would have one representative on the committee, while others have grades 9-12, which will allow them four representatives.

The representatives will meet to discuss, among other issues, policies and actions that directly impact their peers, including student transportation, food vendor transactions, curriculum amendments, disciplinary code modifications and more, according to the policy.

Daughety first wrote the policy as a senior in high school when he was a member of the Newark Students Union. The student-run organization, which has been in existence since 2012, hoped the school board would enact the policy but it was tabled at the time, he said.

David Daughety, 19, of Newark

Recently, school board members reached out to him to see if he could update the policy he wrote two years ago and, on Tuesday, he witnessed the board unanimously pass it on first reading. It was the first time a measure he authored was voted on by a governing body, the aspiring public servant said.

“The way we help students is by listening to students,” Daughety said in a phone call on Wednesday.

As Newark students prepare to start a third school year in the pandemic, he said he feels it’s a pivotal moment to give them a voice as the school board makes major decisions on how to spend millions of federal relief dollars and help students transition to in-person learning full-time.

“This will not only give students a voice but empower them to take back their power as they come back from a year of virtual learning, some falling behind academically, and returning to school at 100% full capacity,” Daughety said. “Students who have been affected by the circumstances of the pandemic will have a seat at the table where they’re planning how we can go forward.”

At Tuesday’s board meeting, trustee A’Dorian Murray-Thomas, along with other trustees, acknowledged the efforts by Daughety and other students to push the policy. Murray Thomas recommended further discussion on Thursday to provide guidance on implementing the policy and elections for the district representatives in the fall.

“It’s clear that this policy is long overdue,” Murray-Thomas said. “It’s important that this committee is actually holding us as board members accountable to what they want.”

Daughety said he’s holding off on celebrating the milestone until after the second vote at Thursday’s meeting.

“The biggest celebration will be when this passes and that empowerment that students across the city will now have,” he said. “It’ll be a win for the students of Newark.”

Newark’s Class of 2022 will have to apply for financial aid to graduate

2021-06-24T10:05:00+00:00

Starting next school year, Newark’s rising seniors will have to apply for federal or state financial aid to graduate.

High school seniors in Newark public schools will be required to complete the federal financial aid form, known as the FAFSA, or, for those who are undocumented, the New Jersey Alternative Financial Aid Application, a new rule mandates. Newark’s school board adopted the measure Tuesday.

Alternately, parents or guardians can submit an exemption form to their child’s school counselor by June 1 of their senior year, the policy states.

The FAFSA unlocks access to federal grants, including Pell grants, as well as work-study programs and loans to pay for college. Data suggests that students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, are more likely to enroll in college after high school graduation when they complete the federal aid forms.

Superintendent Roger León initially proposed the measure at a school board retreat last summer, and the school board quickly approved it. But days later, the board rescinded that decision for lack of community input, consideration for students who might be exempt, and written plans for implementation.

Over the past few months, a 13-member committee that included principals, vice principals, school counselors, students, board members, and community partners reviewed FAFSA mandates that have been implemented in other states, said Mary Harvey, the district’s director of student life.

She added that the Newark committee used Texas’ mandate as a template.

Other states, including Louisiana and Illinois, also have similar requirements. New Jersey, California, and Hawaii, among other states, have proposed bills to make filling out financial aid applications a statewide mandate for high school graduation.

The push to tie FAFSA completion to graduation comes as college enrollment and FAFSA applications have taken a dip nationwide during the pandemic. Through June 11, 51.6% of U.S. high school seniors have completed the aid application, a 5.3% decline compared to last academic year.

Newark has previously made efforts to encourage students to fill out the FAFSA. A citywide coalition sponsored workshops and outreach to increase the percentage of Newark students applying for aid.

The district has previously added graduation requirements that the state does not need, Harvey said. For example, she said, Newark requires four years of math and science, while the district requires three years of those subjects. Newark Public Schools also has seniors complete a thesis and 18 hours of community service.

A “critical component of implementation” of the new rule includes training staff, parents, and students on the application process, the policy states.

The district will also start informing students in the eighth grade about the FAFSA mandate, Harvey said.

At least one parent who spoke during the public comments portion of the meeting said she doesn’t support the new mandate.

“I was glad to see you had that waiver up there because you know what? We’re going to all sign it,” said Cassandra Dock.

Board Co-Vice President Vereliz Santana said the district could be a model for the state as it’s the first to implement this graduation requirement.

“I think I would have benefitted from this policy because I had to fill it out myself,” said Santana, who attended Stockton University after high school. “It is critical. We are trying to remove barriers for our children, and we know that higher education is not for every student but for those who do choose to pursue higher education, this is a tool and resource that could help them achieve those higher education goals.”

For Newark high schoolers, virtual learning will continue even in classrooms

2021-04-01T00:33:38+00:00

Even if they return to classrooms next month, Newark high schoolers will still be learning virtually.

Unlike pre-pandemic high school when students switched classes every period, students who choose to return April 12 will remain in the same classroom with the same teacher for the entire school day, according to interviews with Newark Public Schools teachers and students and a review of high school reopening plans.

And rather than teach the students in front of them, teachers will give online lessons to students who in many cases are in other rooms or at home.

In effect, high schools will offer supervised virtual learning when students return.

Other districts, including New York City and Los Angeles, have taken a similar approach. While not ideal academically, that model of in-person learning can curb coronavirus transmission by limiting students’ movement and confining them to small cohorts, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend.

It also minimizes disruptions if students are forced to quarantine, as they simply shift from taking online classes at school to taking them at home. And while it keeps social interaction to a minimum, the approach still gets teenagers out of their houses and back in the company of peers and teachers.

Such rigorous school-safety precautions are understandable in Newark, where the pandemic has hospitalized and killed the city’s mostly Black and Hispanic residents at disproportionately high rates. Still, some high school teachers and students have questioned whether it’s worth returning to school if most of their learning will remain online.

“I don’t like the idea of going to school just to get back on the computer,” said University High School student Rasheed Smith, who wanted to return in person until he heard the reopening plan. “I could do that at home.”

After operating remotely for more than a year, the Newark school district will invite students to come back into classrooms two days a week beginning next month, and to keep learning from home the other three days. Just under 40% of all families signed up for that hybrid learning model, while the rest chose to stay fully remote. Among high schoolers, the percentage opting to return to campus was even smaller, just 28%, or about 3,100 students.

Elementary schools will also keep students in one classroom all day, which will be an adjustment but not a huge change for younger students used to taking most classes with the same teacher.

But for high schoolers who come back, school will look drastically different than what they’re used to, according to multiple high school reopening plans.

In most cases, students must bring their school-issued laptops and headphones with them each day. Some high schools are distributing clear backpacks that will be easier to inspect when students arrive.

After their temperatures are taken and their hands and shoes are sanitized, students will report to the designated classroom where they will spend the entire school day. Sitting 6 feet apart behind clear desktop barriers, students will log into their online classes, just as they would at home.

During certain periods, students might take a class led by the teacher standing in front of them. But during other periods, the teacher and students in the same room will be engaged in different online classes.

A high school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous so he could speak freely about the reopening plan, said he expects to instruct the students in his physical room for just one period each day.

“The entire rest of the day, those students are just present in my room with me babysitting them,” he said. “They’re just sitting there staring at their computer screens the whole time, doing virtual learning with a teacher who is in a different classroom.”

In most cases, high school students can only leave their classrooms to use the restroom. Cafeterias, gyms, and auditoriums will be off limits, and students will receive to-go lunches as they leave.

At several schools, hybrid students will come to campus either Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday, and everyone will learn remotely on Wednesday while buildings are sanitized. Both remote and in-person classes will now end at 1:30 p.m., with afternoons reserved for students to complete assignments or get individual assistance.

During a virtual forum Monday, Superintendent Roger León suggested that principals could potentially allow students to switch classes — but he advised against it.

“I would not be moving students,” he said, explaining that “non-movement helps mitigate against this virus.”

Rasheed Smith, who was one of the forum’s student moderators, told the superintendent that taking online classes at school defeated the purpose of in-person learning.

Students are “leaving their home to go to school to go back onto a laptop,” Smith said, “when they wanted to go to school to be with their teacher and get that full effect.”

León said he understood students’ frustration with in-person virtual learning.

“I explained that to a student the other day. She was like, ‘Then it’s just like me staying at home?’” he said. “Technically, yeah.”

Despite some dissatisfaction with the hybrid learning plan, several high school teachers and students said they were pleased with the district’s aggressive efforts to ensure school safety. The district has upgraded school ventilation systems, developed a rigorous cleaning protocol, agreed to weekly COVID-19 testing for students and staffers, and set up an employee vaccination site.

Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon said about 75% to 80% of teachers will return to their classrooms next month, with the rest having obtained district approval to continue working remotely. If high schools can safely reopen under the current plan, he added, the district might eventually allow students or teachers to move between classrooms.

“That would be a beautiful thing,” he said, but only “if we’ve gotten the return under control and we demonstrate we can do it safely.”

For now, some people remain unconvinced that learning virtually from inside a high school is much better than doing so from home.

“I want nothing more than to return to the type of learning that we used to have,” East Side High School teacher Kevin Cenac said at a school board meeting last week. “I just don’t want us to return to a situation that is simply worse than the status quo.”

Newark plans for a new public high school focused on architecture and building trades

2021-02-26T02:53:48+00:00

Newark is planning to transform a former hospital into a high school where students can study architecture and train to become plumbers and electricians.

The School of Architecture and Interior Design is expected to open September 2022 at the site of the former St. James Hospital in the East Ward, and officials say the new school will relieve overcrowding at the community’s sole existing high school. The district will lease the privately owned property, rather than build a new campus.

The plan continues the district’s fast-paced expansion, which is intended to offer local families more options and potentially draw students away from private and charter schools and back into the district. And it adds another career-focused high school to the Newark Public Schools roster, in line with Superintendent Roger León’s emphasis on preparing students for professions as well as college.

“We think that this is going to be an absolutely incredible school for the children here in the city of Newark,” León said during a hearing Thursday on the plans, “and it’s going to open up incredible possibilities for them.”

A rendering of the planned high school after the building is renovated.

The new high school will offer concentrations in architecture and skilled trades, including electrical, plumbing, and HVAC, which involves heating and cooling systems. Students who focus on the trades will apprentice under the district’s own skilled workers, officials said Thursday. The school will also offer a course for seniors who want to earn New Jersey real estate licenses.

The vocational courses will introduce students to well-paid professions. In New Jersey, the average salary for architects is $83,600 and for plumbers and electricians it is more than $71,000, according to state data from 2018, the most recent year available.

School board member Yambeli Gomez said the school is a perfect fit for the East Ward, also known as the Ironbound section, where many residents are day laborers who work in the building trades.

“This is so practical,” she said. “If you know that area, you know that there are a lot of tradespeople already there.”

The former hospital, located at 155 Jefferson St., was shuttered in 2008 and has stood vacant for years. The building, which León called an “eyesore,” will likely require significant renovations.

The district plans to lease the building for an estimated $3-5 million per year, said Jason Ballard, the district’s assistant school business administrator. The lease would extend for 20 years, at which time the district could renew the lease or purchase the building.

The former St. James Hospital, which closed in 2008, will require renovations before it reopens as a school.

Ballard said leasing is more affordable than building a new high school, which he said costs an average of $134 million, based on construction plans in other New Jersey cities.

Home to many immigrants and a large Portugese- and Spanish-speaking population, the Ironbound section has just one high school, East Side. With more than 2,000 students, it’s by far the largest of the district’s 15 high schools and is severely overcrowded, said board President Josephine Garcia, who welcomed the new high school.

“I think this was something long overdue in the East Ward,” she said. “This is definitely going to help ease the pain for the families in that ward.”

The planned high school would add to a string of new district schools, including two that launched this school year and three others slated to open this fall. As part of León’s push to revitalize vocational education in the district, the new high schools will offer courses in information technology, fashion, culinary arts, and other fields. The district also has revamped the vocational programs at its comprehensive high schools.

The lengthening list of new schools has garnered praise from families eager for more options and residents delighted to see the district growing after past superintendents closed schools and sold off empty buildings.

However, the district’s rush to acquire more space and establish new schools have also prompted questions about how it will fund the expansion and fill the hundreds of new seats. The pandemic has further strained the district’s tight budget, and the district has not produced data showing a large influx of new high school students.

Some community members also have questioned why the district is opening new high schools when many of its existing ones are under-enrolled and need extensive repairs. At Thursday’s hearing, a few residents asked whether the school will be accessible to students outside the East Ward.

León said students who live in any part of the city will be able to apply to the new high school, which will open with 260 ninth-graders in 2022 before capping off at 960 students in 2026. Officials did not discuss the school’s admissions policy Thursday. But the other new high schools admit students based on their grades, attendance records, and test scores, drawing complaints from some residents who say the schools should be open to everyone.

Despite such questions, families are sure to celebrate the school’s arrival, said Zee Oliveira, a longtime East Ward resident who heads the Ironbound Boys & Girls Club. She has watched overcrowding in the local schools force many families to send their children to classrooms far across the city.

“I am so glad at even the thought of another high school coming here,” she said. “The children of Newark are so deserving of this.”

No Fs allowed: Some Newark high school teachers feel pressure to pass absent students during the pandemic

2021-02-05T01:24:07+00:00

Until recently, Fs were piling up at Newark’s Central High School.

On Jan. 10, the school of roughly 770 students recorded nearly 2,000 failing grades, according to staff emails reviewed by Chalkbeat. That day, a district administrator sent Central’s principal a list of all the students with Fs or missing grades, calling it “an action item that requires immediate attention.”

Two days later, the principal, Dr. Sharnee Brown, issued a school-wide directive: Get rid of the Fs.

“During the pandemic, no student will have missing grades or Fs,” read a slide in a presentation shared with teachers on Jan. 12. Instead, every student was expected to complete the second marking period, which ended Thursday, with a C average or better, the slide said. It called the order a “NO F & Missing Grade MANDATE”.

Schools across the country reported alarming failure rates this fall as students struggled to learn remotely during a relentless pandemic. In Newark, where district officials have not formally changed the grading policy, high schools have instituted ad hoc measures to stem the tide of Fs. The efforts range from offering extra tutoring to giving “incomplete” grades to, in Central’s case, apparently barring Fs completely.

Central’s approach reflects the view of many experts and educators that schools should show students grace during a terrible time. Yet some teachers worry the no-F mandate goes too far, leaving students unprepared for later coursework while papering over the full extent of lost learning.

“In the long run, I think we’re hurting the kids,” said a Central teacher, one of three who discussed the school’s grading policy on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

A slide from the presentation sent to Central High School teachers in January.

Central students could raise their grades by attending tutoring or completing assignments during “Catch Up Wednesday sessions,” the principal’s slide presentation said. But the presentation also suggested other grade-boosting strategies that sounded more like quick fixes than academic improvement.

Teachers could let students complete assignments “as a class” instead of on their own, drop students’ lowest grades, or give extra weight to work students already submitted, another slide said. Its title: “How to eradicate Q2 Fs in 2 days!”

By the end of January, nearly 1,200 Fs had disappeared, leaving 774 in the grading system, the emails show.

Some teachers were troubled. They had no problem letting students make up missing work and retake assessments. But passing students who rarely — or never — attended class or submitted work felt dishonest, they said, and could set up students to struggle in subsequent courses or college.

As educators, “you help students as much as you can” to earn passing grades, said a second Central teacher. “What is extremely upsetting is that, when students are a no-show, we’re being told: No Ds or Fs.”

Dr. Brown did not respond to an email requesting comment.

District spokesperson Nancy Deering did not explain the “action item” email sent to Dr. Brown listing students with failing grades, but she said the matter is under review. She added that the district has not changed its grading policy, which allows teachers to give Fs when warranted.

“The schools are required to follow the district’s grading policy,” she said in an email.

Schools grapple with Fs

Schools nationwide are wrestling with the same dilemma as Central: How do you grade students during a pandemic that has disrupted nearly every aspect of their lives and learning?

Some schools were able to dodge that question last spring when districts such as New York City, Chicago, and Denver suspended their usual grading policies to account for the unexpected shift to remote learning. Newark did not change its A-F grading system, but urged teachers to be “flexible.”

This school year, most districts reverted to their typical grading practices, partly to signal that school is still in session even if classrooms are closed. But even as grading returns to normal, school has not.

Many districts, including Newark, remain fully remote, and the challenges that dogged some students last spring — including unreliable Wi-Fi access and distractions at home — continue. Meanwhile, many young people report feeling increasingly isolated and exhausted the longer remote learning drags on.

Now, teachers in Newark and elsewhere are agonizing over the Fs in their gradebooks. While they are loath to fail students who fell behind during the pandemic, they also are wary of passing students who showed little evidence of learning. The tension is especially acute in high schools, where grades appear on official transcripts and signal whether students are ready for advanced courses and college.

“Whatever you’re teaching, you’re making a commitment to certify that a student has mastered certain content and skills,” said Ron Chaluisan, executive director of the Newark Trust for Education and a former high school principal.

During the pandemic, teachers should be flexible with assignments and offer students extra support — but they shouldn’t automatically pass everyone, he added.

“I think there are things you still have to hold kids accountable for,” he said.

Dr. Sharnee Brown, principal of Central High School

Many Newark students have endured staggering hardships during the pandemic, from inadequate food and unstable housing to family members falling ill, while others have taken on jobs and child care duties.

Aware of those challenges, Central High School has gone to great lengths to assist students. Teachers and other staffers have delivered laptops when students needed them, checked in when students missed class, and offered tutoring when they fell behind. Still, about 20% of Central students were chronically absent in December, according to district data.

Some teachers say they don’t feel comfortable passing those students who have disengaged from class.

“If a kid only hands in two assignments, how do I justify giving him a C?” a third Central teacher said. “To me, that’s not helping anybody.”

Yet school administrators have insisted that all students should pass this marking period — even those who did not meet basic requirements, the teachers say.

“It’s crystal clear, it’s not ambiguous,” the first teacher said. “Even if that kid doesn’t show up, you have to find a way that they don’t fail.”

Kanileah Anderson, whose daughter attends Central, said students had ample opportunities to make up work and get tutoring. If they still didn’t do the bare minimum, she said, then they shouldn’t pass.

“I don’t agree with, ‘We’re not going to fail anybody,’” she said. “It just sends the wrong message.”

Failure as a last resort

The policy at other Newark high schools is that Fs should be a last resort during the pandemic — but they aren’t forbidden, teachers said.

“The word has been that nobody should be failing if at all possible,” said Christopher Canik, a math teacher at Newark Vocational High School. But, he added, “No one’s come to me and said, ‘You absolutely cannot fail a child or give them a D.’”

Canik said he works with struggling students during lunch periods, and allows them to earn extra credit through an online math program. Students who miss class can also watch videos later to get caught up. As a result, most students earned at least a D last quarter, Canik said.

Al Moussab, a history teacher at East Side High School, said he has given struggling students “incomplete” grades and extra support instead of Fs. Like other teachers, he is weighing how to show students grace during the crisis without lowering his standards.

“We’re not benefitting the child just from advancing them,” he said. “But these are extraordinary times.”

The principal of Barringer High School, Dr. Jose Aviles, sent an impassioned memo to teachers this week making a case against Fs.

Failing students who have experienced trauma and poverty and entered Barringer far behind will not advance their learning, he wrote. And the nationwide spike in Fs during the pandemic will have negative effects “felt for decades.”

The memo instructed teachers to give students who complete any work at least a D. Teachers who feel a student deserves an F must complete a “failure justification form.”

Dr. Tanya Maloney, an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Montclair State University, said passing every student won’t benefit those who didn’t learn the material. But she echoed many Newark educators in calling this moment an opportunity for schools to rethink their grading systems.

“We’re having to ask ourselves what is fair,” she said, “in a way we weren’t before the pandemic.”

Newark’s new high schools will handpick students, raising equity and access concerns

2021-01-20T00:02:36+00:00

Several new public high schools are opening their doors in Newark, but only a select few students will be invited inside.

Dedicated to fashion, data science, and international studies, the new “specialized” schools will use a battery of assessments to handpick their students. Applicants must submit their middle-school grades, attendance records, and test scores; take the district’s high school admissions exam; and undergo other evaluations, including an interview, audition, or writing assessment.

The stringent admission requirements mean the schools will only admit a small number of the rising ninth graders who submit applications, which are due next week. With the addition of the specialized schools, 11 of the district’s 17 high schools will now decide which students to admit based partly on how well they performed in middle school.

That doesn’t sit well with some Newark families and student advocates, who say high school seats should be open to the city’s wider student population.

“They kind of say, ‘These are who we want to come here, and if you can’t live up to our standards, then you can’t come,’” said Ashley Paris, whose daughter is applying to several Newark high schools this fall, including one of the new programs. “They should allow these kids to have the opportunity to go there whether they meet the requirements or not.”

All eighth graders in the Newark school district, and those in private or charter schools hoping to attend a district high school, must take the high school admissions exam. Some cities, including Boston and Washington, D.C., canceled their high school admissions tests this year because they could not be safely administered in person during the pandemic.

But in Newark, where schools are operating remotely, the district will have students take the test online next month.

“It’s extremely important for everyone to know that there is an admissions test to enter into any of our high schools,” Superintendent Roger León said last week during an online interview with Project Ready, a Newark-based advocacy group focused on civic engagement and schools. “They will not be in person; all of the exams will obviously be online.”

The new fashion-themed high school will use a long list of criteria to choose students, as is spelled out in the district’s enrollment guidebook.

The new high schools launching this fall are the Newark School of Fashion & Design and the Newark School of Data Science & Information Technology. They join the Newark School of Global Studies, which welcomed its first freshmen class this school year.

The district has designated all three as specialized schools, allowing them to screen students and select which ones they want to enroll. The district also applied the “specialized” label to two existing schools, Eagle Academy for Young Men and Newark Vocational High School, in this year’s enrollment guidebook.

In addition to looking at students’ middle school transcripts and test scores, the new schools will use other methods to evaluate them. The fashion school will interview applicants and review portfolios of their artwork. The data science school is requiring written reflections about technology. And the global studies school, which the district previously called a magnet school, will conduct group interviews and a timed writing assessment.

District officials have not publicly explained why they created the new specialized high school category, which was quietly added to the enrollment guidebook, or why the schools are allowed to limit who can attend. But the changes concern some advocates who say students already have enough to worry about during the pandemic without adding in elaborate new admissions requirements.

“Students are navigating through the trauma of racial injustices, losing loved ones, routine disruptions and social isolation,” Project Ready’s chief of staff, Nayibe Capellan, said in an email interview.

“In general, it is difficult to focus on critical thinking skills while you are immersed in trying to just survive,” added Capellan, who is a district parent and former official. “Therefore, these admission standards and criteria should be flexible.”

In an email, district spokesperson Nancy Deering said that any student is welcome to apply to the new high schools, whose admissions criteria can be found online.

The district already operates six magnet schools that admit students based on their academic records and other criteria. They include some of the city’s most sought-after high schools, including Science Park and Technology, which admit fewer than 20% of applicants. Critics say that Science Park’s admissions policies contribute to an under-representation of Black students at the elite high school.

The addition of the new specialized schools leaves just six district high schools that cannot pick and choose students, but instead must educate anyone who applies or the district sends their way. As a result, the traditional high schools serve students with far greater needs than the magnet high schools do and face academic and attendance challenges.

Some parents and educators favor the selective high school model, saying it offers motivated students a rigorous education amongst like-minded peers.

But critics say selective schools’ drawbacks outweigh their benefits. Research suggests that sorting students by academic ability harms lower-achieving students and may not give higher-achieving students much of a boost. Advocates add that the selective schools should not write off students whose attendance or test scores suffered in middle school, perhaps because they attended a low-performing school or faced hardships at home.

“These children can’t control their external circumstances — their family situations, where they live, how they live, what school they go to,” said Wilhelmina Holder, who leads an advocacy group for Newark parents. “We all know children who messed up badly in their elementary years who turned out to be superstars in college.”

Some parents have mixed feelings about public schools that only admit high-achievers. Parent advocate Yolanda Johnson, who graduated from a Newark magnet school and whose daughter attends one now, believes the schools deliver a top-notch education.

Still, she questioned why the new high schools will restrict their offerings to students who did well in middle school. She wondered: Why not admit students who struggled academically but are passionate about the schools’ themes?

“For me, I would pick the student with the most challenges,” she said. “Let’s accept that student, and see how this changes their life.”

A vast divide: Newark’s magnet schools excel while traditional high schools struggle

2020-11-24T22:01:49+00:00

Newark’s public high schools are split into starkly unequal camps, with thriving magnet schools for a select group of students and struggling open-admissions schools for the rest, district data show.

At Technology High School, for instance, more than 70% of students met state standards in math in 2019 and 100% of students graduated last school year. Meanwhile, at Weequahic High School, 0% of students met math standards and just 75% earned diplomas, according to the data.

What separates the schools is that Technology is a selective magnet school that gets to choose its students, while Weequahic is a comprehensive school that must admit anyone who applies.

The district’s admissions policies have created a two-tiered system where each set of schools serves different groups of students and attain wildly different results, according to the recently released data. In general, the six magnet schools enroll far fewer students with special needs and boast much higher test scores, graduation rates, and college-enrollment rates than the six comprehensive schools, the data show.

Superintendent Roger León has set out to reform the comprehensive schools, yet the pandemic has further strained them. Absenteeism rates skyrocketed at four of the comprehensive schools this September, while the rates declined in all but one of the magnet schools.

“We can’t keep having this disparity — it’s just not right,” said Wilhelmina Holder, a Newark education advocate who leads the district’s high school parents council.

When half the high schools can handpick their students and half cannot, “of course that’s going to create a disparity,” she added. “That’s common sense.”

Open to everyone, the comprehensive schools offer general courses alongside vocational programs. They also provide bilingual and special education services. At four of the schools, 20% or more of students have disabilities; at Barringer and East Side, more than 30% of students are still learning English.

By contrast, the magnet schools serve relatively few students with special needs. Intended for high-achievers, they admit students based on grades, attendance records, and test scores. The most sought-after magnet schools — Science Park and Technology — accept less than a third of applicants.

All of the magnet schools serve smaller shares of students with disabilities than all of the comprehensive schools, and none of the magnets has a bilingual program, according to the district’s enrollment guide.

The district’s admission policy all but ensures that the magnet schools enroll the highest-performing students who earned good grades in middle school, rarely missed school, and did well on the magnet school entrance exam.

Not surprisingly, the magnet schools outpace the comprehensive schools in almost every academic measure.

Remote learning has posed attendance challenges for schools nationwide as some students struggle to get online from home or balance schoolwork and other obligations.

In Newark, four of the six comprehensive schools saw their absenteeism rates spike the first month of this school year, when all students were learning remotely, compared with that month last year. At those schools, half to three-fourths of students missed two or more school days this September — a red flag that signals a high risk of being chronically absent throughout the school year.

By contrast, five of the six magnet schools actually had lower absenteeism rates this September than last year.

Yvette Jordan is a history teacher at Central High School, a comprehensive school where 53% of students qualified as chronically absent in September.

Many of her students have a hard time showing up for virtual class because they feel isolated or distracted at home, or they’re looking after younger siblings, she said. Other students text saying they can’t make it to live video lessons because their Wi-Fi connections gave out. Still others have to earn paychecks; one of her students recently joined a video class from his job.

“They got to do what they got to do to help out at home and put food on the table,” Jordan said.

A former high school principal, Superintendent León took the reins of the district two years ago promising to revitalize its high schools. In particular, he vowed to restore the comprehensive high schools to their former stature.

“We have six magnet high schools that are doing well from an academic standpoint, and six comprehensive high schools that used to lead this nation,” León told the state board of education last year. “Well those six comprehensive high schools have, in fact, lost their way.”

A district spokesperson did not respond to questions about the data and the disparities between the comprehensive and magnet schools.

León has started shaking up the comprehensive schools. He installed new principals in several of them, built out their vocational programs, and paired each one with a magnet school to foster sharing of resources and expertise. Most of the schools’ graduation and college-enrollment rates have improved in the past year — though they still trail far behind the selective magnet schools.

At the same time, León has taken steps that could undermine his own efforts to revamp the comprehensive schools. He instituted a new magnet school admissions test, giving those schools yet another way to cherry pick the highest-performing students. And he is opening three new “specialized” high schools focused on international relations, data science, and fashion and design. (The district already has two specialized high schools, Newark Vocational and Eagle Academy for Young Men.)

According to the enrollment guidebook, the specialized schools will screen applicants the same way magnet schools do — by evaluating their grades, attendance records, and test scores, among other measures. The admissions policy means those schools, just like magnet schools, will be able to siphon the highest-achieving students while leaving the comprehensive schools to educate students with the greatest needs.

At Barringer High School, one of the largest comprehensive schools, 30% of students are still learning English — compared with 0-2% of students at each magnet school. Last school year, 13% of Barringer students enrolled mid-year. Those latecomer students, who may have recently arrived in the country or been forced to leave other schools, often pose big challenges for teachers who must scramble to catch them up. Meanwhile, just 0-3% of magnet school students enrolled mid-year.

Chantee Crespo’s son is a junior at Barringer. She has been pleased with her son’s teachers and the school’s new principal, Jose Aviles, who has reduced suspensions, filled teacher vacancies, and rebooted the school’s parent association.

“I’m a happy parent when it comes to Barringer,” she said.

And yet, Crespo was not thrilled when her son enrolled at Barringer after getting passed over by the selective schools he applied to. Because the magnet schools admit the top-performing students and, consequently, achieve the best results, the comprehensive schools have earned reputations as second-tier schools for students who didn’t make the cut, she said.

“When you don’t get into any of the other schools, it’s like, now you’re in Barringer,” said Crespo, whose own mother forbade her from attending Barringer because of its stigma. “I guess it’s kind of like a punishment.”

The data come from school-level reports the district published last month with figures from the 2019-20 school year, as well as absenteeism rates shared at a recent school board meeting. Because students did not take state tests this spring, test scores come from 2019, as do college enrollment rates from that fall.

While the reports show the sharp disparity among district schools, they do not provide a full picture of Newark high schools. That’s because the city’s charter schools, which historically enroll about 20% of high school students, do not publish similar data. And the state does not separate charter schools’ performance reports by grade level, making it difficult to compare traditional and charter high schools.

Across all grades levels, Newark’s charter schools serve fewer students with disabilities and far fewer English language learners than the district’s schools.

“They need to be held to the same scrutiny that traditional public schools are held to,” said Deborah Smith-Gregory, president of the Newark NAACP.

Amid changes to diploma rules, Newark’s graduation rate climbs above 80%

2020-09-25T23:43:41+00:00

Newark’s on-time graduation rate reached 81% in 2020 — the highest it’s been in decades, district officials said.

The milestone came after the state eased graduation rules in response to the pandemic, helping push Newark’s rate up 5 percentage points, year over year, according to the district’s preliminary numbers.

“This is the first time in over the last 20 years that we have seen that graduation rate, albeit preliminary,” Superintendent Roger León said during Thursday’s school board meeting, adding that the state must still verify the rate.

The superintendent shared the preliminary graduation rate with staff members this month.

New Jersey students must earn a minimum number of credits and pass standardized tests in math and English in order to graduate. However, the state waived the assessment requirement in April after the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancelation of state testing.

The rule change also spared students who had not yet passed the tests from completing an appeals process. That likely benefited many students in Newark, where more than 20% of students in the class of 2019 used the appeals process to meet the English test requirement and more than 30% used it for math.

“Zero students were denied graduation due to failure to meet graduation assessment requirements,” León said Thursday.

In 2019, about 76% of Newark seniors graduated in four years, which is considered on time. The statewide rate was 90.6%.

León first shared that the preliminary 2020 graduation rate had risen to 81.2% at an all-staff meeting earlier this month. On Thursday, he said the final rate “could in fact be higher” as additional students from the class of 2020 meet the requirements to earn a diploma.

“That is a monumental achievement for this district,” said board member A’Dorian Murray-Thomas. “It is a reflection of the brilliance that’s already here.”

‘Just take on the world’: Newark’s class of 2020 offers lessons in persistence and achievement

2020-06-16T20:46:48+00:00

For Newark’s class of 2020, senior year was memorable — but not in the way they expected.

The coronavirus pandemic forced them to spend the final months of their K-12 careers in quarantine, with text messages replacing the banter in hallways and cafeterias, and bedrooms standing in for classrooms. Prom and senior trips vanished, and Thursday’s citywide graduation ceremony will happen virtually, with students donning their gaps and gowns at home.

The future is equally uncertain. No one knows when college campuses will fully reopen, and when — or if — many jobs will return. Meanwhile, recent police killings of Black people have sparked a national reckoning with racism and police brutality that many students find upsetting but urgently needed.

The disruptions could have stopped the class of 2020 in their tracks. Instead, they took their finals, committed to colleges, and pressed on. Newark’s senior class is overflowing with stories of resilience and excellence. Here are four of them.

Taking risks to achieve her goals

Melanie Gonzalez Castillo | Barringer High School

When Melanie Gonzalez Castillo began her freshman year at Barringer High School, she had just arrived in the United States from Mexico. She didn’t speak English.

She enrolled in bilingual classes at Barringer, which has a large immigrant population. She was nervous about attempting to speak English in front of her new classmates. But she forced herself to try.

“I said that if I really wanted to learn, I just had to take some risks,” she said. “If people laugh at me, it doesn’t matter.”

No one laughed. Instead, her teachers and peers embraced her, and Gonzalez Castillo flourished. She managed Barringer’s soccer team and was elected president of the National Honor Society, twice. She became a dance leader and Sunday school teacher at her church, and tutored other students in math. She even joined a public speaking program.

This spring, she was admitted to her dream school: Villanova University.

“I came here focused on my goals,” said Gonzalez Castillo who lives with her sister, father, and stepmother in Newark while the rest of her family remains in Mexico. “I’m sacrificing so much time with my family, so it has to be worth it coming here and all the effort.”

On Thursday, she will give a recorded graduation speech as Barringer’s valedictorian. She plans to share a lesson she has learned during the presidency of Donald Trump, who has maligned Mexican immigrants.

“Ignorant misconceptions that people have about who you are don’t define your potential,” said Gonzalez Castillo, who is graduating with a 4.2 grade point average. “Go out and just take on the world.”

Pushing through adversity

Jamirr Baker | University High School

The coronavirus has been cruel to Jamirr Baker, a star student at University High School.

The pandemic strained his family’s finances, forcing them to move in with his grandmother and aunt, and disrupted his mother’s job as a classroom aide. Now he and his sister help his mother with her new job delivering medicine for a pharmacy.

A math whiz, Baker thrived in school while also running track and competing on a step team. The pandemic separated him from his friends and teammates.

“I miss my team, I miss doing hurdles, I miss stepping,” he said. “Even teachers that are annoying — I miss them.”

But the worst news came last month. Baker had won a full scholarship to Holy Family College, a small school in Wisconsin with a program in actuarial science, which Baker plans to study. Then the college announced that the pandemic had dealt its budget a fatal blow: It will permanently close after this summer. In an instant, Baker’s college plans evaporated.

“I feel like everyone else knows where they’re going,” he said last week, “and I’m stuck.”

Yet like so many Newark students whose lives have been upended by the pandemic, Baker is pushing ahead. He’s reaching out to other colleges where he was accepted, including Howard University, to see if he can still enroll. And as he graduates with a 4.05 GPA, he’s holding fast to his dreams.

“It’s been put on pause because of the pandemic, but I feel like everything’s going to come together,” he said. “I really have hope for myself.”

Changing the system

Kutorkor Kotey | Bard High School Early College Newark

Kutorkor Kotey was 11 years old when her family moved from Ghana to Newark. Her mother, who works in food service at a hospital, always made it clear why she took her two daughters to America.

“She brought us to this country for a reason: to excel,” Kotey said. “So that’s what I’m going to do.”

After attending Chancellor Avenue School, she was admitted to Bard High School Early College, a selective Newark magnet school. There she joined the National Honor Society, the multicultural club, the debate team, the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers University-Newark, and the prestigious LEDA program, which aims to send high-achieving students from under-resourced backgrounds to top colleges. She also found time for an entrepreneurship program that helped her create a business selling ties, bowties, and suspenders made of Kente cloth.

Her hard work paid off: She will attend Princeton University this fall with a financial aid package covering all costs.

Still, the pandemic has created uncertainty. Princeton’s summer prep program for first-generation college students will occur online, making it harder to form friendships and adjust to campus life. And Kotey is still unsure whether fall classes will happen in person and if she’ll move into a dorm or stay home. “Everything is so weird right now,” she said.

Meanwhile, she has been closely following the worldwide protests that began with the killing of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, by a white police officer. Having studied slavery and the civil rights and Black Power movements at Bard, she knows that state-sanctioned violence against Black people is older than America. But so, too, is the Black struggle for freedom.

“At the end of the day, the system was never meant for us,” she said. “The power lies in the hands of white men — that’s what needs to change.”

Embracing positivity

Vashu Patel | West Side High School

Vashu Patel still cringes at the memory of freshman year history class.

He was new to West Side High School and to the country, his family having recently emigrated from Kenya. Now he was straining to understand world history as taught from an American perspective in an American accent.

“That first test was obviously a nightmare,” he said. “I got an F.”

Things quickly turned around. He got the hang of American schooling and started racking up A’s. He joined the soccer and bowling teams and an NGO club, which recently hosted a video chat with nonprofit workers in Somalia. He felt his “stress just disappear” during “Lights On,” West Side’s celebrated evening program that gives students a safe space for sports, art, and socializing. And his dry sense of humor won him plenty of friends.

“I’ve not seen a lot of bad people in this country or in my school,” he said. “Except maybe the freshmen.”

In the fall, he’ll attend the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where his tuition is fully covered. He plans to study computer science after an advanced manufacturing class at West Side sparked his interest in coding. He expects his first semester will be online, “but then I will get out of this lockdown and start going to college like a real man,” he insisted.

Patel’s father works in a duty-free shop at the Newark airport and his mother runs their home. They recently learned that Patel is West Side’s valedictorian. They were overjoyed, if also a little shocked.

“This son who couldn’t get a 50 in math in Kenya suddenly becomes a valedictorian here,” said Patel, who earned a 4.4 cumulative GPA. “They were really proud.”

In light of the pandemic and the protests, his graduation speech will focus on “embracing positivity.”

“Yes, there will be tough times,” he said. “But they’ll go away soon.”

After Murphy eases restrictions, New Jersey graduation events can now include cars

2020-05-14T00:20:49+00:00

As Newark’s high school seniors anxiously await details about their graduations next month, Gov. Phil Murphy delivered them some welcome news on Wednesday: Celebrations involving cars are now allowed.

Unlike other states, where some school districts have planned car parades and drive-though graduation events to celebrate the Class of 2020, New Jersey officials have said only virtual ceremonies would comply with the state’s stay-home rules during the coronavirus pandemic.

But on Wednesday, Murphy began to ease a few of the emergency restrictions, citing a decline in new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. Now, people may gather in cars for graduation events as long as they remain in their vehicles and keep the windows and doors closed, Murphy said.

The rule change cheered Devon Corry, a Newark 12th grader who has proposed drive-through graduations where processions of seniors would roll up to schools and accept their diplomas.

“I’m totally excited,” Corry said Wednesday after Murphy’s announcement. “I view this as an opportunity to put my idea back out there.”

He will have a chance to do that on Thursday, when he and other student representatives, senior class advisors, and principals are scheduled to meet virtually with Superintendent Roger León to discuss graduation options, Corry said. León has said that a ceremony for the Class of 2020 will happen June 18, but he has not said what the festivities will involve.

If Newark does decide to incorporate vehicles into schools’ graduation events, the district will have to find a way to include families without cars. (About 23% of Newark households do not own cars, according to census data.) One option might be to include a virtual component that students could experience from home. The state education department has suggested airing messages on local TV stations, streaming speeches online, or even hosting digital ceremonies on gaming platforms.

Corry has already created an online petition that describes in detail how drive-though celebrations could work. The petition states that, after 12 years of hard work, the Class of 2020 deserves some sort of “recognition that is not virtual.”

“Our senior trips, prom, dinner, etc., have all been canceled due to the pandemic,” reads the petition, which has garnered nearly 100 signatures. “The one thing that we can try to make possible would be our senior graduation.”

Corry said he plans to pitch his idea during Thursday’s call with the superintendent.

“I feel like I can be that person to use my voice and make it happen,” he said. “I have ammunition: I have my petition, I have a plan that’s doable.”

As Newark seniors await graduation plans, New Jersey says only virtual events allowed

2020-05-12T21:13:47+00:00

Like districts across the country, Newark is wrestling with a quarantine quandary: How can high schools adhere to safety rules during the pandemic while still celebrating seniors?

Some students have proposed drive-through graduation ceremonies where a procession of cars line up at schools and graduates pick up their diplomas individually. But state officials appeared to throw cold water on such plans, issuing guidance letters on Friday and Saturday saying any in-person ceremonies — including parades — would violate the governor’s lockdown orders and “only virtual graduation ceremonies can be planned at this time.”

Now, Newark’s Class of 2020 is awaiting word from Superintendent Roger León. León held a virtual meeting with seniors last week where he said that graduation will happen on June 18 — but he has not announced what the ceremony will look like.

“That’s the million-dollar question at this point,” said Devon Corry, a 12th-grader at University High School. “That’s what we’re all waiting for.”

High schools nationwide are finding creative ways to salvage graduation for the Class of 2020, which has already missed out on cherished senior year milestones such as prom and class trips due to the coronavirus pandemic. Some districts have unveiled plans for in-person but socially distanced events, including car parades, drive-through diploma pick-ups, and closed ceremonies where seniors walk across the stage in front of mostly empty auditoriums.

But on Friday, New Jersey’s education department issued the guidance saying only virtual graduation events are currently allowed. The letter offered suggestions, including airing messages on local TV stations, streaming speeches online, or even hosting digital ceremonies on gaming platforms.

The state police superintendent, Col. Patrick Callahan, followed up with a letter on Saturday reiterating that any graduation events that “invite people to gather at a certain location” would violate Gov. Murphy’s emergency orders, which ban public gatherings and forbid leaving the home except for approved reasons. Callahan clarified during a coronavirus briefing Monday that people may drive past graduates’ homes to cheer them on from their cars — but no one should gather at schools or other public places.

“It stinks, there’s no other way to put it,” Murphy said Monday, but added that the need to limit the spread of the coronavirus must outweigh the desire to honor the Class of 2020. “We feel awful, but we also have to make sure that by celebrating this year that we don’t lose somebody.”

The restrictions appear to dash the hopes of students such as Corry, who had envisioned something more memorable than an online commencement.

Devon Corry, a senior at University High School, reads at home while school buildings are closed. Corry developed a detailed proposal for drive-by graduation ceremonies in Newark — but new state guidelines say only virtual events are allowed.

Along with his senior class advisor, Corry developed a detailed proposal for a drive-through graduation where students would hop out of their cars to collect their diplomas and pose for photos one at a time. While graduates awaited their turns, they could watch their school’s valedictorian and salutatorian give livestreamed speeches. Corry, who is the school’s student government president, detailed his plan in an online petition last week that garnered nearly 100 signatures.

Corry is disappointed that his plan now seems unlikely, but he’s trying to keep things in perspective.

“While graduation is one of the biggest milestones in your life, we have to think that we are blessed to have life,” he said, nothing that some students have lost loved ones to the virus.

Stephanie Jones, the class advisor, said seniors will still receive caps and gowns, though the school must figure out how to safely distribute those items and let students clear out their lockers. The school is also honoring seniors by posting their photos on social media along with the colleges they plan to attend this fall. But everyone is still waiting on León to announce the district’s virtual graduation plans, said Jones, who teaches English at University.

“Knowing our superintendent, it will be big,” she said. “We just don’t know anything concrete.”

A district spokeswoman said plans are still being completed, and added that Murphy’s stay-home orders appear to forbid drive-though graduations.

In a letter to families last week, León did not provide details about his plans, but promised “the most incredible graduation ceremony this city has ever experienced.”

Newark students will learn how to protect the planet at revamped environmental studies academy

2020-01-09T00:45:55+00:00

Growing up in Newark, young people are surrounded by environmental hazards — from lead-tainted water to polluted air. Now, more students will be able to help identify solutions.

Newark Public Schools is expanding an environmental studies program at Central High School, part of a district-wide effort to establish career-training programs inside every comprehensive high school. Through the program, students will be able to earn college credits as they develop skills that could help them one day tackle local threats, such as contaminated water, or global issues, such as climate change.

“We are owning the responsibility to make sure that we preserve and conserve the world for our future and the generations to come,” said Principal Sharnee Brown at the program’s launch on Tuesday.

Newark’s new vocational programs, which the district is calling “academies,” are the centerpiece of Superintendent Roger León’s plan to reinvigorate the comprehensive high schools. Those schools tend to have a harder time recruiting students than the district’s selective magnet high schools and many of the campuses are low-performing. But León is betting that the academies will spark new interest in the schools while preparing students for college and lucrative jobs.

Each academy will expose students to a specific career field through classes and workplace experiences, such as internships and site visits. The academies will focus on law and public safety at Barringer High School, teaching at East Side, engineering at Malcolm X Shabazz, allied health services at Weequahic, and business and finance at West Side.

“When students in our great city begin to make the important decision of what high schools they would like to attend,” León said, “they will look at the premier academies and see that their areas of interest can be studied while in high school.”

The district matched each comprehensive school with a magnet school to help develop the academies, and brought in industry and higher-education partners to support each campus. Central’s partners are the Newark-based energy company PSE&G; Kean University, whose campus is just south of Newark; and Science Park, a magnet high school also located in Newark’s Central Ward.

Central students can already take classes in biology, botany, and environmental engineering and data analysis through the school’s existing environmental studies program. The revamped program will focus on sustainability, allowing students to take classes and conduct research as they explore threats to the environment and new technologies that can protect it. Their studies could set them up for possible jobs as climate change analysts, renewable energy engineers, and landscape architects, the district said.

Kean faculty members will help design the new courses so they are aligned with ones offered at the university. Students will be able to earn up to 12 credits from Kean and receive training in workplace health and safety.

“There’s no better time to be inspired to go into the environmental science field or environmental studies than now,” said Daniela Shebitz, executive director of Kean’s School of Environmental and Sustainability Sciences. “We can find ways to protect nature even in our own backyard.”

Central 12th graders Joshiah Gillens and Miah Shepard have done just that. As environmental studies students, they studied Newark’s lead crisis, visited one of the city’s water-treatment facilities, and helped grow beets, cabbage, and carrots in the school’s garden before distributing the produce to community members.

Shepard said the program gave her a new perspective on epidemiology, the field she hopes to work in studying health and disease patterns among groups of people.

“When you sustain the earth,” she said, “that’s the public health.”

Gillens, who plans to study biology in college, said the program made clear how humans can wreck the earth. But it also inspired him to find ways to protect it.

“Ultimately I want a healthy community,” he said. “Becoming a guardian is part of my environmental citizenship.”

‘Check it out’: Newark high schools use annual enrollment fair to boost their reputations

2019-12-10T21:59:37+00:00

The transformation of Barringer High School started long before Newark’s annual school fair kicked off at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

Blue and white balloons had been strung along the hallways. Flyers, candy, and branded pencils were piled atop booths in the gymnasium advertising the city’s elementary schools, while the high schools set up shop inside classrooms. And in the media center’s “winter wonderland,” Santa Claus pulled on his white beard and red cap ahead of a long day of festive photos.

By midmorning, hundreds of families — anxious middle-schoolers, squirming toddlers, and pamphlet-clutching parents — were streaming through the school. It was showtime.

“Welcome! Come on inside,” Naseed Gifted, the principal of Malcolm X Shabazz High School, told a parent passing by the school’s assigned classroom. “Check it out. We’ve got a whole bunch of new things that we’re offering.”

Each December, Newark families begin applying to schools for the coming year. They can use the city’s universal enrollment system to apply to any district-run school and participating charter schools, or apply separately to other charters and county-run schools.

The enrollment fair, which the district hosts, brings that school-choice process to life as schools market their unique offerings and families explore their many options. Every traditional and charter school that participates in the universal enrollment system, which had its new online platform launch on Saturday, is represented at the event.

The fair is especially high stakes for high schools, which, unlike many elementary schools, cannot count on students to enroll simply because they live nearby. Instead, they must convince discerning families that their particular blend of academics, school culture, and extracurricular activities will launch students into the colleges or careers of their dreams.

That sales pitch can pose challenges for comprehensive high schools such as Shabazz and Barringer. Unlike the district-run magnet schools and the county-run vocational high schools, the comprehensive schools do not screen applicants; instead, they admit any student they have space for. As a result, the schools enroll many students who struggle academically or arrive in the city midyear, sometimes from other countries where they spoke little or no English. When measured by their test scores, attendance, graduation rates, and college enrollment, the comprehensive schools tend to trail far behind the selective magnet schools.

Newark’s new superintendent, Roger León, has promised to change that by ramping up the academic rigor at the comprehensive high schools. In recent weeks, the district has also rolled out new vocational “academies” inside the comprehensive schools designed to prepare students for careers and to help with recruitment.

On Saturday, the schools were eager to tout the new programs.

Barringer High School’s new law and public safety academy has its own mock courtroom.

In one classroom that has been converted into a model courtroom, students in police uniforms stood guard in front of a judge’s bench waiting to tell visitors about Barringer’s new law and public safety academy, which launched this fall. Next door, a DJ provided the soundtrack as a student explained how his carpentry class built the judge’s bench and his criminal-law class held a mock trial with SpongeBob SquarePants as the defendant.

Barringer’s new principal, Jose Aviles, has ambitious plans to expand the academy so students can eventually specialize in specific legal fields such as education and immigration. His hope is that students who decide not to enter college right after graduation will be able to find jobs as paralegals, police aides, security guards, and computer technicians trained in cybersecurity.

The ultimate goal, he said, is that Barringer and its new academy — also called a career and technical education, or CTE, program — emerges as a top choice in Newark’s crowded field of high schools.

“We don’t want to be satisfied with the status quo,” said Aviles, who returned to Barringer this year after helming the school nearly a decade ago. “We want each year to get better and better to the point that our CTE program is so robust that we can compete with the magnet schools.”

Yet the new vocational program won’t be enough to convince some skeptical families that the school has turned a corner. So Aviles also highlighted other recent improvements.

Attendance is inching up, suspensions are trending down, and all but two of 17 teaching positions that were vacant at the start of the school year have been filled through aggressive hiring and paying some teachers to take on extra classes, he said. The school’s parent association has been rebooted and nearly 500 parents and guardians attended the most recent parent-teacher conference — a dramatic increase from years ago, when Aviles recalls a couple dozen parents showing up on report-card day.

“Barringer’s had a pretty rough reputation over the years,” Aviles said. “It’s going to take us some time to break that reputation. But I think we’re doing it.”

Last year, the district’s highest-performing magnet schools — Technology and Science Park — topped the list of high schools that rising ninth-graders most often ranked first on their enrollment applications, according to district data. Barringer did not make the top 12.

That disparity in demand was on full display Saturday. While parents and students trickled into Barringer’s rooms, they flocked to presentations by Technology and Science Park that attracted standing-room-only crowds.

Julie Hinds was one of the parents. She had scrutinized the high schools’ state progress reports, their academic offerings, and data on how well they prepare students for college. Based on her research and the schools’ reputations, she decided that her eighth-grade daughter at Elliott Street Elementary School would be best-served by a magnet or charter high school — even though the family lives just five minutes from Barringer.

“Unfortunately, it’s not an option for me,” she said.

Cerryann Jeune, a 12th-grader at Malcolm X Shabazz High School, tells a prospective student about the school’s robotics program.

In a different classroom Saturday, Shabazz senior Cerryann Jeune was trying to show visitors that there is much more to the comprehensive schools than what they might have heard.

Like Barringer, Shabazz boasts a wide array of extracurriculars — from robotics and chess clubs to bowling, cheerleading, football, and many other sports. It allows students to earn college credits through partnerships with the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University. And it is launching a biomedical engineering academy this fall as another option in addition to the school’s existing video game and app-development academy and its natural health and beauty science academy, where students can train to become licensed cosmetologists.

Jeune, who hopes to study biology at Howard University, developed her own hair-care products in Shabazz’s beauty science program. And she’s eager to learn about 3D printing in the engineering academy.

“Not a lot of people know about the great things that are going on at Shabazz,” she said. “All they hear about is the negativity.”

Her classmate, Quan’Yè White agreed. A member of the Malcolm X Shabazz Pride Team, which is committed to improving and promoting the school, White said that reputations take time to revise.

“Perceptions are hard things to change,” she said. “What we’re doing right now is putting in the work to change people’s minds.”

Shabazz unveiled as Newark’s fifth career academy; will offer engineering classes

2019-12-05T02:56:53+00:00

With great fanfare, Newark has unveiled its latest career academy, one with an engineering focus at Malcolm X Shabazz High School.

Even though it’s more than midway through the semester, Shabazz students could start engineering classes as soon as next week, district officials said. They did not say how many students would enroll in the academy.

Students may earn college credit from the New Jersey Institute of Technology for their academy courses. As with other career academies, students will be paired with mentors in industry, district officials said.

The engineering career academy will provide coursework rigorous enough for students to be creating work that they could patent, according to the district. The academy will offer various engineering certifications.

This marks the fifth career academy launch — and the fourth in recent weeks — in Superintendent Roger León’s 17-month tenure, all part of his goal to revamp traditional high schools and better prepare students for college and careers.

Superintendent Roger León announces the new engineering academy at Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark’s South Ward.

The district is pairing each academy with one of the district’s selective magnet schools and with a college and an industry partner.

Shabazz students will be supported by the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Stryker Corporation, a medical technology company. The school will will partner with the magnet school Technology High School.

“For these incredible, beautiful, brilliant students, we want three entities to say it’s legit. We want the magnet to say that it’s worthy of our brand. We want NJIT to say [this work] meets our standards, and we want Stryker to say this will prepare them for the future,” Leon said at the public announcement Wednesday. “I am extremely excited about the incredible work that’s underway.”

The academies are also aimed at making the city’s comprehensive high schools more attractive to students, closing the gap in attendance between the district’s more selective magnet high schools, where the district’s higher-achieving students enroll, and non-selective comprehensive schools, where the city’s neediest students enroll. The academies may allow students at comprehensive high schools to take courses at the partnered magnet schools.

Shabazz sophomore Kennedy Amoako, who participates in robotics, video production, and virtual reality programs at the school, is looking forward to the new classes.

“I want to be an architect based in the engineering field, so I was happy to hear about this,” he said. “It’s going to help me because I’ll have the opportunity to interact with 3-D printing and all this new stuff.”

The New Jersey Institute of Technology will provide staff development, equipment, and financial support. Stryker is providing mentorships and helping Shabazz shape curriculum.

“We hope we’re helping this high school generate graduates that are committed to this journey,” said Robert Cohen, a vice president and chief technology officer at Stryker. “It’s not technology by itself that does anything, it’s the people who use the technology. If we can help this generation find this technology and use it to improve health care, that’s a good thing for Stryker to do.”

A 3-D printer is used in a lab at Malcolm X Shabazz High School.

Pegi Haliti, who has a master’s in biomedical engineering from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, will be teaching engineering design at the academy.

“What they learn in the class, it will be enough for students to pass any exam related to engineering design,” she said.

She said academy courses will culminate in introducing students to biomedical engineering.

Two weeks ago, Weequahic High School unveiled its allied health services academy in a partnership with Rutgers School of Health Professions, Rutgers School of Nursing, and RWJBarnabas Health.

Last spring, East Side High School opened its teacher training academy, which is partnered with Montclair State University and the American Federation of Teachers.

Barringer High School and West Side High School launched their career academies last month. Through a partnership with Rutgers Law School and the McCarter & English law firm, Barringer students will learn about law and safety, while West Side is partnering with Rutgers Business School and Google Creative Labs to teach students about business and finance.

Malcolm X Shabazz High School Principal Naseed Gifted, who has a background in engineering and a degree from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has come full circle with the academy. He credits his education in Newark with launching him into technology.

“It was exposure that inspired me to create and become a problem solver,” he said. “Today is that moment where we get to help develop the next generation of technology leaders, and the young people in front of you will lead the way.”

Newark will open new ‘global studies’ high school to train future diplomats, business leaders

2019-11-20T15:56:34+00:00

Newark will open a new international-themed high school next year, with hopes of training future diplomats and business leaders fluent in world languages.

At the Newark School of Global Studies, students will study diplomacy while learning to speak Arabic or take courses in economics while gaining fluency in Chinese culture and language, Superintendent Roger León announced Tuesday.

“It is our school of the future,” León said at the school board meeting.

The district will also open the Sir Isaac Newton Elementary School, replacing the Newton Street School that was closed several years ago. That school will serve students in prekindergarten to first grade beginning next September, then will grow by one grade each year until reaching eighth grade.

Since becoming superintendent last year, León has promised to create new options within the Newark school system that appeal to students’ diverse interests — and also convince families to think twice before decamping to one of the city’s many charter, private, and county-run schools.

This school year, the district has launched several new career-focused “academies” inside the comprehensive high schools and is rushing to complete a state-of-the-art facility for a revamped vocational high school.

His efforts to expand the district’s offerings follow the rapid growth of Newark’s charter school networks over the past decade; at least seven of those networks educate students through 12th grade, including KIPP New Jersey, which opened a new high school this year. The district loses public funding every time a Newark student opts for a charter school over a district school.

A few years ago, state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson also oversaw the creation of several new high schools. But those openings were overshadowed by her closure of several more schools, partly due to the loss of students and funding to the charter sector.

“The more schools that we open, the more students that will come to us,” León told the board at a retreat in August. “The more schools we close, the less students will come to us.”

The new global studies high school will open in September with about 100 ninth-graders, adding an additional grade each year until it reached 12th grade, León said. It will be housed in a North Ward building currently occupied by a preschool, which will be relocated.

Admitted students will decide this spring whether to pursue the diplomacy track or one focused on international business.

The aspiring diplomats will take four years of Arabic while studying Middle Eastern culture and taking Advanced Placement classes in government and politics, according to a description that León presented. The business students will study Chinese for four years, along with AP classes in economics and Chinese language and culture. Once students have mastered those languages, they will take an “international seminar” in a different country.

“The curriculum fosters fluency in a second language, immersion in a foreign culture and the exchange of ideas via advanced technology,” the description said.

In a brief interview Tuesday evening, León said that students hoping to attend the high school will take the new placement test given to all incoming high schoolers, which determines admission to the selective magnet schools and honors programs at the comprehensive high schools. But the global studies school will not screen applicants based on their grades and test scores as the magnet schools do, León added.

However, at a parent conference Tuesday, León suggested that the new high school is still intended for students with strong academic records.

“All of the classes will be AP,” he told parents, “which means if you’re coming to the school, you need to come ready for the school.”

After León previewed the new high school at the parent conference, several attendees said they were eager to learn more details and found the idea exciting.

“I would consider sending my grandkids there,” said Mary Paige, who has 18 grandchildren in the Newark school system. “To be honest with you, they need to do another language besides English — that would help them down the road.”

Devna Bose contributed reporting.

Two more Newark high schools get career academies, a crucial element of the district’s improvement plan

2019-11-08T22:10:07+00:00

Two Newark high schools launched career-focused “academies” this week, bringing Superintendent Roger León closer to his vision of revitalizing the district’s traditional high schools and preparing students for college and careers.

Barringer High School now offers a law and safety program that includes a JROTC chapter. Students in West Side High School’s new business and finance program will choose from five specialties, including accounting, sales, and supply chain management. Each program is paired with a magnet school in addition to a university and industry partner, with the goal of providing role models and potential advocates who may one day help students land jobs.

The new programs are meant to improve career education in the district, and also make two of the city’s comprehensive high schools more attractive to students. Higher-achieving students mostly enroll in the district’s selective magnet high schools, leaving the non-selective comprehensive schools to educate the city’s neediest students.

León has been talking about plans for the academies and improved career and technical education since his tenure began in 2018.

“This is important work that could not be accomplished without our partners,” León said in a press release announcing the new programs. “They bring invaluable experience and a unique perspective to our students and provide game-changing opportunities for them and their families.”

West Side Principal Akbar Cook said the new programs are essential for making sure students graduate with marketable skills and certifications.

“We have to stop throwing every kid at the college route and think they’re all going to stick to the wall,” Cook said. “They’re not.”

East Side High School was the first school to announce an academy, with a focus on teaching, last year through a partnership with Montclair State University and the American Federation of Teachers.

Under the academy structure, students benefit from a blended curriculum that features out-of-class learning experiences, specialized courses to earn industry certifications, and skills to land internship opportunities in Newark and beyond. The district says it has spent nearly $375,000 bringing facilities and infrastructure up to speed in the schools hosting the new programs.

“The goal is to diversify the course offerings so much that we have something for every student,” said Jose Aviles, Barringer’s principal. “I think people get stuck on having one pathway and we want to increase as any pathways as we possibly can.”

Wednesday marked the official unveiling of the William J. Brennan Courtroom, named after the former Supreme Court justice, Newark native, and Barringer graduate. Students will have class and participate in mock trials led by Rutgers Law School staff and McCarter and English attorneys. University High School, which already has a law program, is Barringer’s magnet high school partner, meaning that Barringer students will be able to take classes there.

Barringer had an existing career and technical education program offering students specialized elective courses in carpentry, computer applications, graphic design, and more. Carpentry students built the bench and judge’s box.

Classes began this fall though faculty and partners continue planning a comprehensive curriculum. First-year students learn about civics and civil law; the programs for subsequent years are still being developed, Aviles said.

Students will have the opportunity to visit the Rutgers Law School campus McCarter and English law firm to observe classes and experience a day in the life of a practicing attorney. In the future, the program could expand to include a paralegal certification and options for college credit through Rutgers Law School.

Attorneys will meet with students to talk about their interests and expose them to different legal fields. Students will receive mentorship and support which is especially important for those who may not have a lawyer in their family or may not have talked to one, said Robert Mintz, managing partner of McCarter’s Newark office.

“A lot of where people tend to end up in their career paths has to do with they’re exposed to in their educational journey from high school and college,” said Mintz. “We’re giving students the opportunity early on to think about their careers now even before they’re going to college.”

At West Side’s business and finance academy, students will get support from Rutgers Business School and the opportunity to earn credentials with Google Creative Labs. The school is partnering with American History High School, a magnet school.

The school already offered career and technical education electives. West Side also operates a Capital One bank, which Cook said is the only student-run branch in New Jersey and one of four in the country.

Classrooms have been renovated to be set up like corporate conference rooms and students have the opportunity to participate in virtual enterprises where they hire C-suite executives to run a business to compete with other students from over 40 countries.

“I want the first floor of my school building to look like a mall,” said Cook, who said he’s using entrepreneurship to lure students away from the temptation of fast money and street life.

He envisions a program where students start on campus at the school store and eventually have the opportunity to become partners in business outside of school.

Part of the developing curriculum features partnerships with local businesses and competitions for student to pitch their own business ideas for startup money, said John Impellizzeri, a Rutgers Business School professor with decades of experience in supply chain management.

Impellizzeri advises the academy and believes in the program’s power to attract more students to combat West Side’s declining enrollment and develop top talent.

“Give this a chance and it’s going to become an amazing place for young people and to cultivate not just the next generation of RBS students,” he said. “But the future CEOs, CFOs, and entrepreneurs of this world will come out of West Side High School. I can promise you that.”

Correction: Nov. 11, 2019: This story has been been corrected to reflect John Impellizzeri’s status at Rutgers Business School.

With New Jersey’s 10th-grade exams on their way out, testing concerns turn to graduation requirements

2019-11-01T21:12:00+00:00

Now that New Jersey is planning to reduce the number of tests that high school students take, advocates are beginning to shift their focus to the new graduation requirements that could become the replacement.

The state Board of Education voted this month to eliminate math and English state exams for 10th graders after the 2019-2020 school year. Changes would start with the Class of 2023, making this year’s sophomores the last to be tested.

The board also voted to have 11th-graders either pass a new test to graduate from high school or successfully submit a portfolio for review — and what those requirements could look like is raising fears among advocates who pressed the state to dial back testing.

Nearly half of New Jersey graduates last year replaced test scores at least partially with alternatives, including collections of their work known as portfolios. Under the state board’s plan, how those portfolios are evaluated would change, but it’s not clear in what ways.

“What the portfolio option is going to include is unclear. Where they’re going to set the cut score on this new 11th-grade test is unclear,” Stan Karp of the Education Law Center told Newark parents and advocates during a presentation last weekend. “This proposal, while it’s better than adding more tests, you really don’t know the impact of what these rules are going to be on our kids.”

Karp directs the Secondary Education Reform Project at the Education Law Center, one of several New Jersey groups to successfully push back against the last round of high school testing rules. In 2016, then-Gov. Chris Christie encouraged the state board to stop allowing students to use alternatives to testing to demonstrate their readiness to graduate from high school. A lawsuit that year led to continuing protections for students who did not pass the state’s exit exam.

In 2017, nearly two-thirds of Newark Public Schools graduates used alternate assessments to graduate.

It is uncertain if the new 11th-grade exam would be more like the proficiency exam that New Jersey required before adopting new tests in 2016, or more like the current exam, a New Jersey-specific version of the national exam known as PARCC. Students passed the state exam test at a higher rate than they do the current test.

“We won’t know the answers to those questions for at least a couple of years,” said Karp, who warned that the choice could make the difference between graduating and dropping out for thousands of high-need students.

“They don’t help the kids that pass and it hurts the kids that don’t,” he said. “We don’t want to test and punish. That’s what we have.”

Christie’s push for tougher tests and more stringent requirements reflected the argument, prevalent in statehouses at the time, that existing exams did not ask enough of students. Some advocacy groups in New Jersey have continued to bang that drum: JerseyCAN and Better Education for Kids last week released a statement in response to the state board’s decision calling on the legislature to “ensure our state maintains meaningful graduation requirements.”

But Karp and other advocates say there is a glaring misalignment between what the tests measure and what students are learning inside the classroom. Failing scores don’t necessarily mean that students lack the skills they need, said Lyndon Brown, a longtime education advocate in Newark.

“We have kids who sit in a class all year with different substitutes every day in Algebra II and basic courses that they need. We have kids who supposed to have IEP accommodations for longer test time or personal aide and don’t have those accommodations being met,” Brown said. “It is unfair to those kids when they are unproperly prepared.”

When Audryea Jackson saw that her students struggled to read and write well during her time as an English teacher at Barringer High School in 2016, she questioned whether trying to get them prepared to produce an essay for a state exam would help them.

Jackson began advocating for students to opt out of testing and for the state to get rid of the PARCC exam. It’s not that the students were not interested in learning how to read and write properly, she says, but that they needed a different approach to help them be able to do so.

“Assessment needs to be revisited. In 2019, I don’t think the state assessment is the appropriate way to assess our children,” said Jackson, who favors a portfolio assessment for all students.

“Students need to be able to utilize math, reading, and writing but the focus should be on their gifts, talents, and what they want to accomplish in the future,” she said. “Education and assessment need to be built on that.”

The proposed regulations open for 60 days for public comment from Dec. 2 until Jan. 31, 2020. State board members meet to make a final vote in early February.

A Newark student dreams of completing college. But first he must survive summer ‘boot camp.’

2019-09-18T17:33:22+00:00

One balmy morning this July, Yamin Reddick sat down in front of a computer in a windowless college classroom and braced himself for the day ahead. At 8:30 a.m., another eight-hour round of classes would commence, followed by homework late into the night. Then a few hours of sleep, wake up, and repeat.

That grueling schedule had become Reddick’s life ever since he earned a diploma from Newark’s Central High School in June and, days later, started a six-week summer program at Rutgers University-Newark. Known around campus as “academic boot camp,” it’s designed to prepare disadvantaged high school graduates for the rigors of college.

At Central, where Reddick managed to get decent grades even as he traveled the country for speech and debate tournaments between after-school shifts at the local Wendy’s, he told anyone who would listen that he was headed to Rutgers-Newark. Just a mile from his home, it’s the public university where his mother once enrolled but dropped out after giving birth to Reddick and his twin sister.

Reddick intended to pick up where his mother had left off. He could already envision the “Black Excellence” student group he would found at Rutgers-Newark before launching a career in community organizing and politics — just like his hero, Cory Booker. If he were elected, he’d get the lead out of the city’s water and make sure every student attends an excellent school. He believed his own success would set straight all the people he’d seen scoff at Newark. And he wasn’t afraid to voice his grand ambitions: “I want to become part of Newark’s history.”

But before he could rise to become Newark’s next great leader, he had to earn a college degree. And before he could start on the path to a degree this fall, he needed to pass his summer classes. Otherwise, his college career at Rutgers could end before it even began.

“Our final exam is exactly one week from today,” his summer math instructor, Jose Garcia, told Reddick and his classmates that morning.

Reddick logged onto the course’s online learning program. He has always struggled with math, and his scores on a placement test landed him here — a remedial class covering fundamentals like fractions, geometry, and equations.

Reddick got to work. Babyfaced and exuberant, he can seem younger than his 19 years. But now he was stern-faced, writing out problems with pen and paper — unlike high school, no calculators allowed — as he raced to complete coursework that was due in just a few days.

He answered a string of division problems correctly. “Excellent progress — keep it up” flashed on screen. But then a section on multiplying positive and negative fractions broke his streak. He rubbed his eyes. Then came questions involving percents and decimals. He asked for help.

“Mr. Garcia, it says I got this wrong,” Reddick said. Over his white T-shirt hung a red Rutgers lanyard bearing his student ID, on loan for the summer.

Garcia helped him find the solution. But a few minutes later, class was over. Many of his classmates had completed their problems. Reddick still had 113 left to go.

College, to say nothing of the degree he believes will unlock the life he dreams of, still seemed a long way off.

The promise

A decade ago, when Reddick was still in grade school, he was standing outside his apartment one day when a black SUV drove by. A tiny Reddick waved. The SUV’s rear window lowered and a smiling man waved back. It was Newark’s new mayor, Cory Booker.

When he took office in 2006, Booker promised to revitalize the aging city, where nearly one in three children lived in poverty. And he would transform its troubled school system, which about half of students passed through without earning diplomas. He subscribed to a doctrine of education change that would find disciples from Wall Street to the White House, which held that if traditional schools were thoroughly overhauled and new charter schools opened, poor students would graduate high school, earn college degrees, and escape poverty.

The superintendent Booker helped recruit, Cami Anderson, laid it out in 2013: “The first thing is to define success. And that’s pretty simple. Every kid of school age in Newark is in a school that puts him or her on the path to graduate from college.”

The goal of getting all students to college was rooted in the reality that higher education — despite its rising costs — remains this country’s main engine of upward mobility. Yet only 60% of students who enroll at four-year institutions earn a degree within six years. The rate is even lower for black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

In Newark, more students are entering and completing college today than when Booker first became mayor, according to an analysis by researchers at the Newark City of Learning Collaborative and Rutgers University-Newark. Yet even with those gains, less than half of Newark graduates who head straight from high school to four-year colleges earn degrees within six years. At the district’s traditional, non-selective high schools — like the one Reddick attended — just 16% of graduates who immediately enroll in college earn bachelor’s degrees six years later.

Booker is now running for U.S. president, while many of the children who grew up during his mayoralty are entering college. Newark has a new mayor, Ras Baraka, a former high school principal who has made it a goal to get more Newark residents to attain degrees. The school system’s new superintendent, Roger León, has signed on, recently promising to pair all high school graduates with mentors to shepherd them through college.

Newark needs you. Everywhere needs you.

One of the leaders of this citywide effort to boost college completion is Rutgers-Newark, long touted as one of the most diverse national universities in the country. About two-thirds of its black, Hispanic, and low-income students graduate in six years — well above the national averages for those groups. Unlike other colleges that enroll similar student populations, there is virtually no graduation gap between its black and Hispanic and its white and Asian students, or its poor and non-poor students.

The summer program Reddick is part of is one component of the university’s Educational Opportunity Fund program, a longstanding statewide effort to help low-income students complete college. It’s one of the many ways that Rutgers-Newark tries to get students who face the longest odds of graduating to cross the finish line.

“I tell them: I can’t afford for them to fail,” said Sherri-Ann Butterfield, Rutgers-Newark’s executive vice chancellor. “As a country I can’t, as an institution, as a city. Newark needs you. Everywhere needs you.”

A Newark education

The path to a college degree begins long before students ever step foot on campus.

Reddick’s journey — which, in some ways, is also the story of education in Newark over the past two decades — began at Camden Street School. Housed in a red-brick building around the corner from Reddick’s apartment in the city’s impoverished Central Ward, the school educated three generations of Reddick’s family: his grandparents, his mother and her twin brother, and Yamin and his twin.

Reddick with his mother, Linda Williams.

The school felt like home to Reddick. His grandfather would drop by to chat with the security guards and check on Reddick and his sister. His kindergarten teacher, who had taught his mother years before, took Reddick to sing at her church on the weekends.

“They all knew my family,” Reddick said. “They had me on the push to always do what I had to do, to always be that scholarly student.”

Then, in 2011, when Reddick was in fourth grade, Cami Anderson came to town. Under orders from Booker, then-Gov. Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg — the Facebook CEO who had committed $100 million to improving education in Newark — the new superintendent embarked on a sweeping overhaul. It involved the closure of several low-performing and under-enrolled schools and the restructuring of others, including Camden Street. Before long, the school’s principal and many teachers had been replaced.

“Everything kind of fell apart. The school wasn’t what it was anymore,” Reddick recalled. “I just felt like somebody robbed us.”

The disruptions continued. Reddick left Camden Street after fifth grade and bounced from a new district school to a charter school, a type of school that proliferated under Booker. During eighth and ninth grade, his family moved to South Carolina, back to Newark, then to Elizabeth, N.J., with Reddick landing in a new school at each stop. In Elizabeth, he attended a diverse arts high school, where he learned to play guitar and sang Taylor Swift songs with friends of different races — a first after years of segregated, all-black schools.

“It felt like ‘High School Musical,’” he said.

But then his family uprooted again, returning to Newark where his mother worked as a clerk in the county welfare office. As he entered his sophomore year, Reddick enrolled at Central — the high school down the street from his apartment where Mayor Baraka had once been principal and Reddick’s mother was an alum.

The school’s academic record wasn’t great, but Reddick believed he would be comfortable there, safely removed from the bullying he had occasionally endured over the years on account of his sexuality — he identifies as gay — and his outsize personality. “Some people,” he said, “when they look at me, their first impression is: I’m doing too much.”

At orientation, he heard about the speech team, a variation of debate where students perform humorous pieces, dramatic readings, poetry, and more. A natural performer, Reddick decided to join. For the next three years, he practiced until 6:30 or 7 most school nights, and competitions filled his weekends.

The team traveled to tournaments at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Kentucky, they marveled at the sophisticated-looking students striding across the lush campus and thought, “That’s going to be us.”

Yet they could not escape the sense that something different, often something lesser, was expected of them because of who they were: black students from a high-poverty school in Newark competing against many affluent white and Asian teenagers, whose schools (unlike Central) offered whole classes on speech and debate.

Reddick responded by perfecting his craft. “You got to come prepared,” he said. Central’s coach, Dennis Philbert, often had his students play against expectations, reading European works in German and Russian accents. But in his senior year, Reddick decided to put racism and the harsh policing of black people in the spotlight.

He drew on his childhood memory of police officers storming his apartment, guns drawn, in pursuit of one of his family members. And, more recently, the time when an officer aggressively questioned him as he hurried home from school in the rain. He began performing a piece about Trayvon Martin and a poem called “The War on Black Boys.”

“I wanted to make a statement,” he said.

Back at Central, Reddick made himself into a leader. He joined a group that gave policy recommendations to Superintendent León, and got elected as Central’s student body president. Sometimes, he would stand in the hall and tell his peers to get to class. “You would really think Yamin worked for the school,” said Reddick’s friend and speech teammate, Zawadi Kabazimya.

Meanwhile, he put in hours at a fast-food restaurant and a supermarket, and helped care for his four younger siblings. With his mother working full-time and his father not closely involved with the family, Reddick dropped off his siblings at school and tried to set an example for them.

“I want them to know that if you know what you want in life, if you have a mission, you attack it while you can,” he said. “You do it now — don’t wait until later.”

Like at Camden Street, Reddick found a second family at Central. His classmates encouraged him, and the staff cared for him. Yet there was no denying that academic achievement was low at the school, where most students are poor and about 30% have disabilities. In Reddick’s junior year, nearly two-thirds of students were chronically absent and just 2% passed the state’s math tests. Only a third of Central graduates enrolled in college that year.

The real thing comes now.

Reddick maintained a 2.5 GPA, which ranked him 60th out 152 students in his senior class. The school offers few college-level courses, but it allows students to take classes at a local community college. Reddick passed several classes there and aced a speech class. But he failed the college-level writing and Algebra courses.

Still, Reddick had reason to celebrate when he graduated this June. He had worked diligently in and out of class, and made a name for himself — his principal called him a “superstar.” He had learned resilience from his mother, Linda Williams, who survived homelessness and domestic violence, and now pushed her children to excel in school. “Because of your race and where you’re from, people are going to think less of you,” she said. “You have to show them who you are.”

As Williams watched her son walk across the stage that day, she was overcome with pride. But she could not help but think of the next challenge that stood before him: college.

“The real thing comes now,” she recalled thinking. “We got to attack these years.”

Make-or-break summer

On a Saturday morning just over a week after graduation, Reddick found himself sitting in an immense room on Rutgers-Newark’s campus alongside more than 100 other recent graduates. All were hoping to be the first in their immediate families to earn a four-year college degree.

It was orientation day — not for college, but for the program that promised to help get them through college.

Reddick on Rutgers-Newark’s campus.

The Educational Opportunity Fund, or EOF, program was established in 1968 in response to deadly unrest in Newark the previous year, when black residents raged against the political oppression and police brutality they had long endured. The statewide program was designed to steer “educationally and economically disadvantaged” students to colleges, such as Rutgers-Newark, which at that time was 95% white in a majority-black city.

But the campus was slow to enact the program. So, in 1969, members of the university’s Black Organization of Students barricaded themselves inside a classroom building that they dubbed “Liberation Hall” and demanded that the school recruit more black students and faculty members. After a three-day standoff, officials agreed to implement EOF in earnest. A half-century later, about 45% of Rutgers-Newark students are black or Latinx, earning it the top spot on U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of the most diverse national universities for much of the past two decades. (It’s now tied for second place.)

Leading Reddick’s EOF orientation that day in late June was Dean Deborah Walker McCall. She has a commanding presence tempered by a warm smile; she calls herself the program’s “mama bear” and the students her children. A native Newarker, she had taken advantage of EOF’s services years ago as a student in Rutgers’ College of Nursing even though she wasn’t technically part of the program. “I’ve always been team EOF,” she said.

Years later, she returned to direct Rutgers-Newark’s EOF program out of a deep belief in its premise: that when given the proper support, students from poor families and under-performing schools can do just as well in college as their more privileged peers. “Watching students who were told they can’t demonstrate that they can” had convinced her of that, she said.

Today, Reddick and his peers at Rutgers-Newark are among some 13,500 students at more than 40 New Jersey colleges and universities who participate in EOF programs. To be admitted, students must come from families with incomes that are no more than double the federal poverty threshold and have grades or test scores below the participating institutions’ normal cutoffs. Using state funds, the institutions provide EOF students with counseling and mentoring, small grants to help cover expenses like books and housing, and academic preparation in the form of intensive summer classes before they officially start college.

But all that extra support cannot erase the difficulties faced by many EOF students, who tend to lag behind their peers academically when they enter college. At Rutgers-Newark, just half of EOF students graduate in six years, according to 2017-18 data provided by officials.

At the orientation, Reddick listened closely as the dean laid out the summer program’s requirements. Students would attend class from 8:30 a.m. to 5:20 p.m. Monday through Thursday, with tutoring on Fridays. If they did not earn at least a combined C average in their classes, they risked not being admitted to the university that fall.

“You’re going to be stretched and pulled in ways you’ve never been before,” Walker McCall said she told the students.

As Reddick left that afternoon, his new Rutgers ID and summer schedule in hand, he was struck by how the deans and counselors had addressed the students. In high school, the staff had dealt delicately with the students, who were, after all, still teenagers finding their way in the world. Reddick still felt that way, yet the adults here seemed to view him differently — as an adult himself, fully in charge of his actions and his fate.

“This is going to be on me,” he thought. “I’m responsible for everything.”

That evening, Reddick’s mother and grandparents hosted a surprise party for him. Surrounded by balloons in Rutgers’ red and black, his extended family feasted on shrimp and ribs and toasted his accomplishments. His grandfather, Louis Williams, served cake that he baked for the occasion.

After all that excitement, Reddick overslept the next morning. He missed the second day of orientation.

The next day, classes began. Just as they were starting, Dean Walker McCall pulled Reddick into an empty room. Where had he been on Sunday? And why hadn’t he called anyone? Everything got blurry, but Reddick recalled hearing next: “We might have to let you go.”

He began crying. It hadn’t sunk in until that moment that if he didn’t meet the requirements, he could lose his spot in the program — and at Rutgers. He called his mother, who quickly arrived to meet with the dean. Walker McCall agreed to let Reddick continue. But the message Reddick left with was clear: “You’re an adult now,” he said. “If you don’t show up, you don’t get the job.”

After that inauspicious start, nothing really got easier. Reddick and his peers shuffled from math to English to geology class each day. They also took a course that taught them study strategies and how to interact with professors — critical skills that many new college students must learn on their own. In between, they got 80 minutes for lunch. Most used that time to study or meet with counselors.

You’re going to be stretched and pulled in ways you’ve never been before.

Reddick had never before been assigned so much work or held to such high standards. In math, he struggled to do basic computations without a calculator and to master topics he didn’t recall being taught in high school. In English, the online sources he cited in his papers were scrutinized, errors in his grammar and logic highlighted.

At home, he stayed up late working on a laptop the program loaned him. If it got too hot inside, he’d sit on the front stoop, accepting the clamor of traffic as the price of a cool breeze. A couple times, he broke down.

“He was burned out,” said Williams. “He was drowned.”

And he wasn’t alone. Many incoming EOF students are daunted — not only by the workload, but also by the holes in their learning that the summer program exposes. The instructors try to fill what gaps they can. But they also expect, even want, students to struggle in the summer when they’re surrounded by caring adults and peers from similar backgrounds. It’s a little like a failure vaccine that builds up students’ immunity through exposure.

As Reddick’s summer English instructor, Crystal Coble Hamai, put it: “Without the boot camp, if he had just come in in the fall and that was his experience in the first five weeks of school, then he might have said, ‘You know what, I don’t know if college is for me. I can’t do this.’”

‘It wasn’t going to be easy’

In early August, the Rutgers-Newark EOF students piled into two chartered buses. They wore nice clothes — dresses and button-down shirts, the occasional tie. Reddick had on a three-piece suit. Thirty minutes later, they disembarked at a Hilton hotel in Springfield township and entered the grand ballroom. They had come to celebrate the end of boot camp.

It was lunchtime, and the students filled their plates with heaps of cheesy pasta, baked chicken, and steamed vegetables. Then Dean Walker McCall addressed the students. She wore a headscarf around her long hair and a black blouse with sparkling embroidery.

Dean Deborah Walker McCall.

“I cannot tell you how proud I am of each and every one of you,” she began. She admitted that she had worried about some of the students. But they had dug deep and pulled through.

“We told you it wasn’t going to be easy,” she said. “Did we lie?” The students roared back: “No!”

She reminded them that she had also promised they would form a new network of friends and allies, repeating her saying that EOF stands for “extension of family.” That prediction had also been borne out.

The students had bonded over their shared work and anxieties. They had let off steam during weekly social events at the campus athletic center, where they learned to dance bachata and played pick-up basketball alongside their instructors. And that was by design, a way to combat feelings of isolation and being adrift that can besiege first-year students — particularly poor students, who are more likely to live and work off campus.

Now, she told the students that, in just a few weeks, they would officially start as Rutgers freshmen. They were already intimately familiar with the campus, and had taken classes that mirrored ones they would take this fall. So while their number was small, just 109 students, they were poised to become campus leaders and guides for the non-EOF freshmen. “They’re going to be lost like you were at the beginning of the summer,” she explained.

Finally, she had them peer even further into the future. “I personally can’t wait until four years when we’re in, perhaps the Prudential Center, screaming and hollering and congratulating you on your graduation,” she said. As if rehearsing for that promised day, Reddick and the other students screamed and hollered and cheered.

The event celebrated students’ hard work during the summer regardless of how well they performed in class. But the next day, it was time for them to learn their final grades.

Reddick was sent to Dean Walker McCall’s office to receive his. He’d already gotten a preview in English. For the final, Reddick had written a five-page research paper titled, “The Miseducation of Our Urban Youth.” “Growing up in a metropolitan area, I attended public school, and I witness first hand some of the disparities that plague the urban area,” he wrote. He got back a C.

Now the dean informed him that, in addition to a C in English, he had earned an A in his study skills class. But he had ended geology with a D and math with an F, according to Reddick. (Walker McCall declined to discuss individual students’ grades.) His average was a D — not the C required to pass. He would not be admitted to Rutgers.

Stunned, Reddick handed over his student ID. He held back his tears during the meeting. But that night, he awoke at 3 a.m. and began to sob. “I failed, I failed, I failed,” he repeated to himself. And it wasn’t just himself he had betrayed. “I failed the world.”

The starting line

Statistically speaking, the deck had been stacked against Reddick all along, as it is with so many other aspiring college students like him.

Many low-income students of color attend segregated, underfunded K-12 schools that struggle to prepare them for higher education, then are funneled into colleges with the lowest graduation rates. Almost by design, many of those students fail to earn degrees. Yet when that happens, it isn’t the unfair system that takes the blame — it’s the students.

“I am a person who really seeks a great future.”

When Reddick got the awful verdict that day, at first he wondered if he had been mistaken for another student. He felt as if he had worked 10 times harder that summer than he ever had before. Now he was told that wasn’t enough.

Then he thought about his mother, his siblings, his former classmates and teachers at Central. He had promised them he would achieve great things at Rutgers, then use his education to uplift Newark, the hardscrabble city he cherishes.

“People are waiting to see what I’m going to bring to the table, how full the plate is going to be when they receive it,” he said. Now that dream had vanished, leaving him with a vast emptiness inside. “I have nothing now.”

The decision not to admit some students even after they endured such a demanding summer program certainly appears harsh. But it reflects a clear-eyed acceptance of the fact that some students leave high school far behind the college starting line. “You
can’t undo that or fix that in six weeks,” explained Walker McCall. Far worse than rejecting a student who truly is unprepared for college would be admitting him, she said.

“The last thing we want to see is someone come here, fail semester after semester, run out of funds, and end up having to pay off loans and debt that they are not financially equipped to do because they don’t have a degree that’s going to get them a good-paying job,” she explained.

People are waiting to see what I’m going to bring to the table.

Yet, with Reddick, Walker McCall ultimately decided that he actually did have what it takes to succeed at Rutgers — not just raw intelligence and ambition, but also a willingness to learn from his struggles. There had been some EOF students who failed to meet the summer program’s minimum requirements and did not seem to learn from the experience. The dean would not admit them. But Reddick had owned up to his shortcomings and drawn lessons from them.

“At the end of the day, he demonstrated growth in the six weeks and maturity and I think came to some realizations,” she said.

So a few days after her meeting with Reddick, Walker McCall asked him to return to her office along with his mother. After the dean spoke privately with Reddick’s mother, she shared the news with him: She was giving him a second chance. He would be allowed to start at Rutgers this fall, but on academic probation. There would be mandatory tutoring, a supplemental math class, a reduced course load — and higher stakes than ever. A GPA below 2.0 in his first semester could mean the end of the road at Rutgers.

“The God I serve is so good to me!” Reddick exclaimed after the meeting. He vowed to watch online math tutorials before classes began in a few weeks. He would skip campus parties that fall. He would earn all A’s.

At Rutgers-Newark and its EOF program, Reddick had found a university that saw the tough circumstances some students face not simply as obstacles to surmount; they were also wells of strength to be tapped. And, unlike at some institutions, its leaders said they would not leave students to sink or swim. Instead, they promised to do all in their power to steer students to graduation. “I’m clear that once they’re here, they’re our responsibility to get out,” said Sherri-Ann Butterfield, the executive vice chancellor.

Whether Reddick and the university would achieve their shared goal of getting him to graduation would only start to become clear in the months ahead. For now, all Reddick could do was commit completely to this fresh start.

“My goal is to knock this out with a straight A-plus,” he said that August afternoon. “To prove to myself that I am capable of passing. To prove to them that my word is my word and I am a person who really seeks a great future.”

This project was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Newark Vocational High School is open again. Its building is still closed.

2019-09-05T15:15:16+00:00

Newark Vocational High School was poised for a grand re-opening this fall.

Led by a new principal, the revamped high school was set to return to its own building, after spending several years cooped up inside a shared campus. Its new home was supposed to be decked out with state-of-the-art facilities where students would learn trades like printing and culinary arts.

“We actually have a new high school opening up in September of 2019 called Newark Vocational High School,” Superintendent Roger León said in December. “That will be opening up at 301 West Kinney, here in our great city. We’re extremely excited.”

Yet when Aziz Dao went to that address Wednesday morning to enroll his nephew, he found the doors locked and signs directing him to a different building up the street.

“I was very surprised when I got there,” Dao said, as he and his nephew set off to the alternate site.

It turns out the district was not able to complete construction on Newark Vocational’s building at West Kinney before the new school year began this week. That has left Newark Vocational stranded inside a former elementary school building. The temporary space is a far cry from the renovated building that Newark Vocational students were promised, which is supposed to feature cutting-edge facilities that simulate actual workplaces.

The temporary site is also housing New Jersey Regional Day, a district-run school for children with multiple disabilities, while that school’s roof is repaired.

León broke the news to people at Newark Vocational last month, according to a school employee. But he didn’t say when they would finally be able to move into their own building.

“The superintendent didn’t want to give us a date,” said the employee, who declined to be named. “He just said we’ll be there soon.”

A sign outside Newark Vocational High School’s building at 301 W. Kinney St.

The district has provided scant public information about Newark Vocational and its relocation. No details can be found on the district website, and a spokesperson did not respond to questions. A student said Wednesday that he showed up to the West Kinney building on the first day of school only to be sent to the alternate site at 150 Newton Street, about a 10-minute walk away.

Financial challenges appear to have hobbled the district’s efforts to revamp the school’s building in time for the new school year.

Newark Vocational previously occupied the building at West Kinney in the city’s Central Ward until 2014, when the school was downgraded to a program and moved into West Side High School’s campus, according to state records.

In December, León said he was restoring Newark Vocational to a full school in its own building, which would reopen this September with a single class of ninth-graders. It would then grow by one grade each year.

The move to relaunch the high school as a fully equipped vocational school appears to be part of León’s broader effort to better prepare students for good-paying jobs — and to convince students to remain in the district for high school rather than opting into popular and well-funded vocational high schools run by Essex County.

“In four years, we’re going to see an incredible high school that will compete for children who want to have an incredible high school experience,” León said about Newark Vocational.

The revamped school is slated to feature cutting-edge facilities where students can train for careers in printing, culinary arts, and the hospitality and tourism industry, officials have said. The facilities are to include a mock hotel lobby and a model restaurant in the school cafeteria, according to the school employee.

In March, a district official said those renovations would entail significant construction — and the removal of dangerous asbestos.

“There are electrical and plumbing requirements, which means you open the wall,” said Valerie Wilson, the district’s school business administrator. “And you open the wall, you abate asbestos or remediate.”

The state’s School Development Authority, which oversees facilities in high-poverty districts, provided a grant to help cover the cost of the renovations, according to an agency spokesperson. The state funds covered work on the building’s exterior, including its roof and windows.

The district was responsible for covering the other costs and managing the project, the state spokesperson said. The district set aside $2 million for its portion of the work.

However, in a letter to the state education commissioner last month requesting emergency funding, León said the district had been forced to make staffing cuts and postpone repairs due to budget constraints. The $2 million renovation of Newark Vocational was listed as one of the cuts.

Mary Bennett, a former Newark principal who was hired to help audit the district’s facilities this year, said that construction is still underway at Newark Vocational. Bennett, who did not personally review the West Kinney site, said she believed the building would “probably” open around the middle of this school year.

In the meantime, Newark Vocational students are still taking career classes even though they don’t have access to the new facilities, the school employee said.

Sefora Bobb, whose child attends New Jersey Regional Day School, said the different schools seem to be getting along well while they temporarily share space in the former elementary school building.

“There’s enough space in there for everyone,” she said.