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The first day of school for Newark students is two weeks away, and Superintendent Roger León’s goals for the year are aimed at improving student achievement, boosting literacy and writing skills, and growing enrollment in advanced classes.
León shared his goals for the new year with school board members during Saturday’s annual board retreat. He shared plans to continue an early childhood enrichment program that pairs pre-K students with high schoolers, plans to enroll more students in AP Seminar, and a requirement for more public speaking and writing opportunities for students as the district continues to integrate AI into classrooms.
This school year marks the seventh of León’s 10-year strategy, “The Next Decade: 2020-2030,” and so far, the district has seen improvements in graduation rates and enrollment, but reading and math scores continue to lag behind statewide averages.
The plan lays out six priorities, each with specific actions, milestones, and benchmarks. The district checks progress on each priority at five points over the plan’s 10 years, which began with assessing the 2020-21 school year and ends with examining years 2027–30. The priorities are:
- Unify and align systems so district resources and departments are following each priority and initiative.
- Create a strong framework for curriculum and instruction that helps students learn about different perspectives.
- Develop a strength-based and responsive culture by creating a plan for building and maintaining positive school and classroom culture.
- Ensure a climate of continuous learning by providing staff the resources and funding to promote professional development and learning opportunities for parents.
- Strengthen the district’s ability to offer student support services and evaluate them.
- Develop strong partnerships to help the district and schools work more closely with outside organizations.
This year is the district’s fourth checkpoint to confirm that the groundwork laid in earlier years is moving into real progress, according to the strategic plan. On Saturday, León said, year seven is a time to ensure that “everything that we say we are doing, we are actually doing.” He added that the district aims to have nearly all of the strategic plan in place by next year.
The district will focus on several key initiatives this year, including “B4K,” or before kindergarten initiative, which prepares pre-K students for kindergarten, and transition plans for second graders entering third grade, a critical year when research says students should already be reading. The B4K program on Saturdays is continuing to expand this year with volunteer high school students mentoring 3- and 4-year-olds in ballet, soccer, basketball, and STEM skills. León said the initiative fits into a broader research model based on the idea that before third grade, children spend their early years learning to read so that by third grade they can start reading to learn.
León said the district also will push to increase enrollment in AP Seminar, an English course for sophomores. He said 97% of sophomores who take the course pass the state’s English language arts test the following year. The district also will add new college-level courses, such as AP Cybersecurity and AP Business with Personal Finance, as well as a new police and firefighter program offered in partnership with the city.
Writing is already part of every subject, and fourth graders already take a writing assessment, León said at the retreat. This year, the district will introduce public speaking practices to students as early as third grade and build it into the curriculum review across all grades. In grades six through 12, students also will get more writing and speaking opportunities across all subjects along with a new speaking assessment in eighth grade.
Other new programs include the new Jet Black Pilot Program, a partnership with United Airlines pilot Captain Carole Hopson, who aims to train 100 women of color as pilots by 2035. Hopson started the program with the district this summer by working with 14 Newark high school students.
The district is also working with the John C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies at Rutgers University Newark “to study this 10-year plan” so that larger districts can draw intervention strategies from Newark’s approach and smaller districts can see “how you can actually improve your district.” León said Newark’s wards are comparable to school districts across the state, such as the South Ward and Camden, and the North Ward and Union City. Because of that, he said, Newark’s strategies can be utilized in other school districts, which he called the ultimate goal of the 10-year plan.
The initiatives mark the district’s latest push to turn León’s decade-long plan into classroom results. District leaders have implemented programs like Saturday school and before- and after-school tutoring for elementary and high school students to help them refine their skills in English language arts and math. Those efforts have helped Newark students recover faster than most, but the latest state test scores show ongoing support is needed.
Newark Teachers Union president John Abeigon said they want to continue working with the superintendent, but more work needs to be done to ensure a “uniformity of message.”
This year, the union’s two priorities are to continue teacher-led collaboration through the School Leadership Council, an initiative born out of the union’s collective bargaining agreement with the district in 2024. The superintendent’s goals can lose precision as they move down the chain of command, Abeigon said. He added that the current structure “hinders effective communication” with teachers and said the information that passes through leadership “turns into a game of telephone,” with each layer of leadership interpreting it differently.
The result is, he said, “in 60 different schools, you get 60 different messages.”
Still, Abeigon said, the district needs to keep retraining administrators between León and teachers so they can act as “resource providers.” Rather than giving orders, Abeigon said, they should ask teachers what they need to accomplish district goals.
Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.
