Chalkbeat

Newark students say curfew could curb teen violence but more needs to be done

2024-05-01T10:00:00+00:00

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In November, a 15-year-old Central High School student was shot during a drive-by after students were forced to evacuate the Newark school due to reports of a gas leak. In March, two students were shot outside West Side High School as students were being dismissed.

As city leaders aim to prevent other incidents like those and keep teens off the streets, Newark this Friday will start to enforce a youth curfew that has long been on the books but never enforced.

The curfew for teens under 18 is in response to an uptick in youth engaged in violence or victims of it, “mostly in places where teens shouldn’t be after hours,” Mayor Ras Baraka said at a press conference last week.

But Nora’a Armstrong Johnson, a senior at Essex County Payne Technology High School, can foresee resistance to the new curfew among her peers and says she isn’t sure if it will help cut back on youth violence. The Newark youth curfew will be in effect Friday through Sunday beginning on May 3. On June 21, when the school year ends, the curfew will be enforced seven days a week between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. as part of the city’s Summer Safety Initiative, which also includes summer programming, Baraka said.

Newark police who see teens without an adult during curfew hours will stop them and request their home address and information before contacting the city’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, which will take teens to their homes.

If a parent or guardian is not at home or can’t be reached, teens will be taken to the city’s new reengagement center, which will stay open until 2 a.m. during the curfew, city leaders said. If parents are still not reached, teens will be transported to a local hospital to receive a medical clearance and, if they are not picked up by a parent or guardian after four hours, the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency will be contacted.

Baraka says the curfew is not “a police event” and there are no fines or penalties for teens who break it. The rule is meant to engage city teens who may not usually seek help, Baraka added, such as youth who are not in school or working, who make up 1 in 5 Newark teens and adults 16 to 24.

“What we’re doing is trying to take people home,” Baraka said. “There actually may be kids that we find on the street who have run away or kids who are dealing with issues at their home who may not want to be home.”

During a peace walk in Newark's South Ward, community members stopped at the corner of Clinton Avenue and Stratford Place for a moment of silence to remember those lost to violence. The walk was hosted by the City Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, Hear My Cries, and Brick City Peace Collective, among others.

National report shows youth crimes peak after school

More than 400 towns, cities, and counties have enacted youth curfew laws, according to the National Youth Rights Association. But youth “crime reduction efforts should focus on the after school and early evening hours,” according to the 2022 Youth and the Juvenile Justice System report by the National Center for Juvenile Justice. Violent crimes committed by youth peaked after school at 3 p.m. and “then generally declined hour by hour until the low point at 5 a.m.,” according to the report.

The report found that 64% of all violent crimes by youth occurred on school days, and nearly 1 of every 5 of these crimes, or 18%, occurred between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. During standard curfew hours, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., 14% of violent crimes were committed by youth, according to the report.

Across the country, violent crimes against young people doubled in 2022, according to the FBI’s National Crime Victimization Survey data as youth arrests for those crimes, which include murder, robbery, and aggravated assault, have been on the decline. In public schools across the nation, 67% reported having at least one violent incident during the 2021-22 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Johari Sutton says she began hearing about fights among her peers starting in eighth grade.

The now-12th grader attended Phillips Academy Charter School in middle school before moving to Englewood with her family at the start of high school. Although she was never a part of those fights, she would often hear about them at school or from students like her cousin, who attended Central High School and saw fights often, Sutton said.

She feels that violence among her peers often stems from encounters outside of school and on social media before turning into physical altercations. The role models around them also play a part, Sutton said.

“They’ll see like adults fighting and then they’ll think that that’s how they’re supposed to solve their problems and they’ll bring that to school,” Sutton said. “So if someone like roasts their hair on Instagram or something, they’ll be like, do you want to fight or something?”

In Newark, groups like Hear My Cries are working to reduce violence in the city. They partner with city and local leaders in hosting after-school programs for Newark teens and most recently, organized a peace walk in the city’s South Ward to raise awareness about violence among young people.

Sean Kirby was among those walking down Clinton Avenue last Thursday chanting “stop the violence” and holding signs that read “peace” as residents driving by honked in support of the marchers. Kirby, a Hear My Cries volunteer who helps run the organization’s after-school program on Bergen Street, said he thinks the youth curfew won’t work because some teens like to hang out outside their homes where, he believes, drug-dealing happens.

“I know because I used to do that,” said Kirby, who in previous years found himself in and out of prison due to drug-related charges and other offenses

Armstrong Johnson, who turned 18 in April, won’t be affected by the curfew but thinks following it could pose problems for some teens. Johnson remembers instances where she was out late with friends who didn’t want to go home and fell into arguments with them.

Although she’s never seen or experienced a violent crime and thinks her Central Ward neighborhood is not dangerous, she doesn’t think it’s safe enough to hang out with friends at night. She’s also heard of fights outside her school and others in Newark as well as shootings involving teens.

Even though Armstrong Johnson wonders if her peers will follow the curfew, she believes Newark residents should also enforce it. For instance, she said, if someone is hosting an event that will go past curfew, they should check the ages of guests.

“Are they actually over 18? If they’re not, send them home,” Armstrong Johnson said.

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

Newark youth not in school or working nearly double the statewide rate, new report finds

2024-04-24T16:45:37+00:00

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Nearly 1 in 5 Newark teens and adults between the ages of 16 and 24, 7,500 young people, do not attend school or have a job – almost double the statewide rate and above pre-pandemic levels, a new study released Wednesday found.

The report, conducted in partnership by the Newark Opportunity Youth Network and Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, also found disparities among racial groups and geographic locations in Newark.

The disconnection rate for Black youth in Newark is 22.3%, the highest among the city’s major racial and ethnic groups, while Latinos have a rate of 16.9% and white youth 9.1%, the report found.

By neighborhood, most of Newark’s South Ward and southern parts of the East Ward, specifically, zip codes 07114 and 07106, have the highest rate of youth disconnection: Around 1 in 3 to 1 in 4 young people ages 16-24 who reside in these areas are disengaged, according to the study.

Areas in southern Newark, including the southern parts of the East Ward and South Ward, have the highest rate of youth disconnection.

Thousands of young people in Newark and across the country disengage from school due to various reasons, including violence, an unstable home life, trauma, poverty, or other barriers, according to the Social Science Research Council. Eventually, youth gradually stray from learning and, without the proper support and interventions, may drop out of school or leave the workforce entirely.

In recent years, New Jersey and Newark leaders have ramped up efforts to change the trajectory for these teens and young adults often called “opportunity youth.”

In Newark, city and public school leaders launched a new reengagement center aimed at targeting students at risk of being disconnected. At the state level, Gov. Phil Murphy in January signed The Disconnection Prevention Bill, a law that establishes an ombudsperson to work with the Disconnection Prevention Task Force to analyze the causes of youth disconnection and recommend best practices for reducing school disconnection to school districts.

In cities such as Detroit and Chicago, nonprofits and school districts are also working to tackle the issue in their areas.

Among the report’s findings:

Compared to other cities in the Northeast, Newark has roughly twice the number of young adults out of school and out of work. The New York City metro area, which includes Newark and Jersey City as well as Long Island and counties in the Lower Hudson Valley and Connecticut, has a disconnection rate of 10.6%.
More than 1 in 4 of Newark’s youth living in poverty are disconnected — 28.5% — compared to 14.1% of youth not living in poverty. Overall, the poverty rate for Newark youth is 23.6% but for disconnected youth, that rate is 38.3%.
Disconnection rates among mothers ages 16–24 is 34.8%, higher than that of young women without children, who make up 15%. Mothers in Newark make up 14.3% of disengaged youth but only 6.7% of youth overall.
In Newark, girls and young women have a higher disconnection rate than young men who are not incarcerated — 16.2% compared to 15.7%.
In Newark, 66% of disengaged youth — 4,800 young people — have not worked in the past five years.

Despite the troubling trends found in the report, Newark and New Jersey have experienced a sharp decline in youth disconnection rates since 2020. In New Jersey, the rate dropped from 11.3% in 2021 to 9.4% in 2022 and in Newark, it dropped from 22% in 2021 to 18.4% in 2022, according to Wednesday’s report.

Robert Clark, founder and chief executive officer of the Newark Opportunity Youth Network, attributes those gains to increased awareness of the issue and collaborative approaches to “develop strategies, not just programs.”

“One of the aims is to make sure that not only are we talking about the number of young people, but that we’re also talking about all of the supports that are necessary to support what is a broader community challenge, and also raise attention to the idea of equitable distribution of resources to support these young people,” Clark added.

The report found that Newark has “incredible resources” and strong community ties that have shaped racial and ethnic neighborhoods with thriving community-based organizations. But despite being the largest city in New Jersey, home to the largest school system in the state, an international airport, a sports arena, a performing arts center, government offices, and private-sector institutions and companies, “the local community does not often benefit from the economic bounty the city attracts and creates,” the report found.

The study also makes recommendations to reduce the barriers that perpetuate youth disconnection such as poverty, lack of health insurance, home life, teen births, and food insecurities.

Prioritizing high school completion, building high school to job pipelines, focusing on youth in poverty, supporting youth with disabilities, and helping young mothers pursue their educational and career goals are all objectives that “will have a positive effect on youth connection,” according to the report. The analysis also suggests that acting on “early-warning signs” such as low student academic performance or missing 18 days of school or more is key to helping teens stay in school until graduation.

Clark says the study released Wednesday is meant to continue to raise the issue among state and local leaders and “provide opportunities for all communities in New Jersey to be stronger.”

“In Newark, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and work with the collective array of organizations to figure out how we continue to communicate, get better, and create stronger networks of support for these young people,” Clark added.

Correction: April 30, 2024: A previous version of this story said 1 in 3 to 1 in 4 of the city’s disengaged youth live in zip codes 07114 and 07106. The young people who live in those zip codes are disengaged at a rate of 1 in 3 to 1 in 4.

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

Newark Police still struggling to fill crossing guard vacancies

2023-09-15T10:30:00+00:00

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D’Renna Johnson stood at the intersection of Lyons Avenue and Aldine Street while cars, trucks, and motorcycles whizzed by on Monday afternoon — just as George Washington Carver, a K-8 school, dismissed its students for the day and hundreds of kids streamed out of the building.

All the while, the sky fluctuated between a drizzle and blazing heat. Johnson left her post only to put away her rain jacket or to put it back on. But her eyes remained fixed on the street no matter the weather.

“That was very dangerous!” yelled Johnson to a teenaged boy who ran across Lyons seconds before a bus passed fast enough to spray rain water several feet in the air.

“Sorry ma’am,” he said, as Johnson reminded the young girl trailing behind him to tie her shoe.

For the past year, Johnson has stood guard at various intersections around the city as kids commute between home and school. But she’s not a school crossing guard. She’s the director of the Newark Community Street Team, an outreach organization that tackles violence prevention, offers victim services, and runs Safe Passage, a program working to ensure students get to and from school safely.

For the last three years, Newark Community Street Team and other advocacy groups have been requesting that more crossing guards be stationed throughout Newark.

At the heart of the push is student safety.

According to New Jersey’s 2021 Highway Safety Plan, 22% of pedestrian-involved crashes from 2014-2018 happened between 3 p.m. and 5:59 p.m. — the height of school dismissal and student travel time. Almost 12% of those accidents involved children 15 and younger.

One of the New Jersey Department of Transportation school zone design guides also notes that the “proper placement of well-trained crossing guards is one of the most effective methods” in improving student safety.

But this school year, 87 crossing guard positions in Newark remain unfilled, according to the Newark Police Department. And, since 2021, the number of guards has fallen from 137 to 84.

In Newark, all school crossing guards must be hired by the police department, so Johnson is limited in the duties she’s legally allowed to perform.

“I’m not able to help them actually cross the street because I’m not a crossing guard, but at least I can make sure the little ones are safe,” said Johnson.

On Monday, Johnson estimated that 40 members of the Newark Community Street Team were stationed at high-risk posts throughout Newark. While they aren’t able to act as crossing guards, they can keep an eye on students as they commute.

D’Renna Johnson stands in front of George Washington Carver elementary and middle school.

Pointing down the street, Johnson rattled off the names of seven schools in the area: Weequahic. George Washington Carver. Chancellor Avenue. Chancellor Annex. Eagle Academy. NJ Regional Day School. Bruce Street School for the Deaf.

“But,” she noted, “there’s only one guard around here.”

In a statement to Chalkbeat, Newark Deputy Director of Police Operations Sharonda Morris said the Newark Police Division is actively recruiting school crossing guards and setting up informational tables at senior citizen buildings, precinct community meetings, and community service events.

Newark Community Street Team has continuously proposed solutions to the Newark Police Department and the state legislature since 2020.

Elizabeth Ruebman, managing director and co-founder of Newark Community Street Team, says a New Jersey statute that requires crossing guards be “of good moral character” and not have “been convicted of any criminal offense involving moral turpitude” acts as a barrier.

“Moral turpitude is extremely subjective,” said Ruebman. “We have had many people say to us, ‘I’ve applied and I’m not eligible.’”

Ruebman also noted that other states allow crossing guard hiring to be handled outside of city police departments. In Los Angeles, for example, these positions are managed by the city’s Department of Transportation.

Last year, progress was made when Newark Community Street Team partnered with State Sen. Teresa Ruiz to draft a bill that would make more people eligible to apply. However, Ruebman says she hasn’t heard from Ruiz since March 2022.

Ruiz’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

In January 2022, Ruiz joined Newark Community Street Team’s biweekly roundtable to hear the organization’s suggestions. But at this week’s meeting on Tuesday, which Newark police representatives attended, the same problem was rehashed again: There aren’t enough guards, and the hiring process is obstructing change.

“When I get my granddaughter at Rahway, there’s a crossing guard at every corner,” said Sharon Redding, an activist and Newark Community Street Team member. “Let the [Newark Police Department] director know, tell him, that our children are more important than money.”

And Toby Sanders, Newark Community Street Team’s director of education, said “I’m not begging y’all to start accepting the viability of the formerly incarcerated … I’m saying it’s a must that we do that, because that is where the hope is.”

The organization has worked closely with Parents Educating Parents, a group founded by Yolanda Johnson, a Newark parent, to improve communication between schools and families.

“If I want to see change, I need to step in myself,” said Yolanda Johnson. “Yesterday, I finished orientation to become a crossing guard.”

She was struck by the intensity of the application process.

“It feels like applying to become a police officer,” she said. “They ask if you have even a juvenile record, and you have to provide an explanation with documentation.”

The application asked questions such as: “Have you ever had a record expunged or been accepted into pretrial intervention or Conditional Discharge Program?” and “Have you ever been apprehended by any law enforcement officer as a juvenile?”

Yolanda Johnson was also surprised to find that the application required information about her husband, such as his address and the location and date of their marriage.

“I have a hard time with this issue because my grandma relied on crossing guards to get me to school when I was growing up. She could only walk as far as the porch,” she said. “I know how important crossing guards are.”

At the end of Tuesday’s roundtable, Ruebman concluded “We will always bring this up with great passion because we love the children. This will not go away.”

Newark Community Street Team’s next public safety roundtable will take place on Sept. 28 at 10 a.m.

Samantha Lauten is a fall reporting intern for Chalkbeat Newark covering public education in the city. Get in touch with Samantha at slauten@chalkbeat.org or reach the bureau newsroom at newark.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Newark student reading scores are low. Will the city’s new literacy action plan help?

2023-07-18T21:58:09+00:00

Surrounded by books at the Newark Public Library on Tuesday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka announced a 10-point Youth Literacy Action Plan that calls on the city’s schools, parents, community partners, and programs to get young children reading and writing amid low state test scores.

The plan focuses on developing literacy opportunities in all city programs, improving access to books that reflect cultural and ethnic backgrounds, encouraging expectant parents to read to their unborn children, and providing tutoring for students during the school day, among other points.

City, community, and local partners will work to pool their resources to promote the plan, host events and giveaways, and teach parents how to create reading opportunities for their children, city leaders said during a press conference on Tuesday.

“It is all our responsibility to make sure that our kids are reading on grade level,” Baraka said on Tuesday. “I want everybody to feel the same heaviness and weight that I feel. We believe that this is urgent for all of us to be engaged in immediately.”

Last spring, only 49% of New Jersey students passed the state’s English language arts test and only 27% of Newark public school students reached proficiency levels. Among Newark’s third graders, only 19% passed the state’s test, the lowest of any grade in the city.

Experts say being able to read fluently impacts a child’s likelihood to graduate high school, pursue college, and ultimately a career. From kindergarten to third grade students are learning to read and by fourth grade, students are using reading skills to learn, said Newark’s Chief Education Officer Sharnee Brown during Tuesday’s press conference.

Baraka’s plan “emphasizes prenatal to third grade” children to ensure the literacy work begins early and sets students up for long-term success, Brown added. The plan also encourages expectant mothers to seek prenatal care in clinics throughout the city to build healthy brain development and recommends that parents read to their unborn children.

The city’s action plan also calls on parents to enroll young children in free pre-K3 and pre-K4 programs in district or charter schools or programs led by community-based providers. The goal is to motivate families to incorporate reading activities for their children at an early age and continue them outside of the school day by reading to them and helping build their vocabulary.

“I look at literacy as building a house and ensuring a good, solid foundation,” Brown added. “When we teach young people how to read well, we’re really teaching them how to excel.”

The action plan encourages Newark parents to develop a home library and provide children with access to books. Research shows that children growing up in a home with a 500-book library helps them stay in school for 3.2 years longer compared to homes that have little to no books.

Brown said the city and local community partners are working together to host book giveaways and reading events throughout Newark this summer. In August, the city will host its annual “Reading Under the Stars” event to teach families how to read together. The plan is to “incentivize and celebrate reading” and “make it a Newark culture” to read, Brown added.

Newark Chief Education Officer Sharnee Brown explains the importance of promoting reading and developing literacy skills for young children during a press conference.

“We’re creating these literacy events where parents come and get free books but we’re also teaching parents how to do some of this work,” Brown said.

The Newark Public Library also offers programming for children year-round including reading activities, and reading challenges for kindergartners, elementary, middle, and high school students.

“You really want to incorporate literacy and reading into everything,” said Asha Mobiley, youth services supervisor at the Newark Public Library. “We really want to meet our young readers where they are so that we can help them get to where we want them to be.”

Baraka is also calling on city schools to implement one-on-one high-dosage tutoring during, before, and after the school day to help grow in reading and writing skills.

Research shows that high-dosage tutoring, or 30-minute tutoring for two to three days a week, provides the most impactful results. Newark Public Schools will continue to host its after-school Excel program this coming school year to provide tutoring, but will create more tutoring opportunities while students are in school, Superintendent Roger León said during a June press conference.

Currently, the district utilizes skills from an evidence-based reading approach known as the science of reading to teach students how to read, said León in June. This coming school year, the district will be using the “Fundations” program to help students learn the foundational skills of reading such as phonics, spelling, and writing, Mary Ann Reilly, Newark Public Schools assistant superintendent and director of the Office of Teaching and Learning, said on Tuesday.

“We also want to make sure that children are building important knowledge and they’re using reading in order to do that,” Reilly added.

Additionally, Newark’s plan calls on community-based and after-school programs to incorporate a literacy component into their programming and mandate funding to programs and sports that incorporate some level of reading and literacy. All city programs must provide a literacy program and if they don’t, Baraka wants parents to hold those programs accountable.

The 10-point plan was developed through research-informed data on literacy and in collaboration with Baraka’s Brain Trust, a group of community organizations focused on improving reading levels in Newark.

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

‘Girls know what they want’: New Jersey girls expand programming to support local youth

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

Growing up in Ecuador, Karen Otavalo struggled to stay motivated in a country where opportunities did not come as easy for girls.

Otavalo paid attention in class, did her homework, and got good grades – the usual things students do to get ahead in school. But Otavalo, now a sophomore and a participant in Chalkbeat’s Student Voices Fellowship program, couldn’t help but feel something was missing from her education.

She wasn’t getting hands-on experience and opportunities to practice what she was learning, making her feel ill-prepared for her future.

Otavalo’s opportunities expanded when her family moved to the U.S. in 2018. Now, she is helping give other New Jersey girls the opportunities once out of reach for her.

She is one of 10 high school and college girls from New Jersey chosen to participate in a program designed to develop girls’ leadership skills. The New Jersey Justice Collaborative for Girls is a state-funded leadership and advocacy program that empowers young women to be leaders and is fueling Otavalo’s dreams to help vulnerable communities in the future.

After moving to the U.S., Otavalo and her family ultimately ended up in Newark, where she struggled to learn English and adapt to the culture. Despite the language barrier and a pandemic that disrupted her high school experience, Otavalo moved out of Newark’s English Language Learners program and to Science Park High School where, she says, her opportunities have been endless.

The N.J. Justice Collaborative for Girls, with funding from the state’s division on women, hired the 10 high school and college students, who also form part of a youth advisory board responsible to research, review, and analyze grant applications from nonprofit organizations looking to empower New Jersey youth through activities, programming, and outreach. Through the funding, the collaborative pays each girl $35 an hour for their work.

Under the guidance of the collaborative’s senior director, Aysha Khan, the girls were tasked with selecting three organizations, one in each geographical region in New Jersey, for a $30,000 grant to help expand leadership and advocacy opportunities for girls in the state.

It was important to have young women like Otavalo make these decisions, Khan said.

“Girls know what they want. They know the roadmap for what it takes for them to thrive,” Khan added. “It’s on us as adults in this space to take a step back and facilitate and organize a space for them to use their voice.”

The work started last summer when the collaborative first convened to receive training before delving into the applications. Each girl in the group was paired with a mentor, who helped guide them through the grant selection process and develop their passions or work on their self-esteem as they got to know each other.

The girls vetted grant applications from 10 organizations and dived into everything from their financial stability to their letters of recommendation and their plan to create empowerment programs for young girls. By September, the group had chosen the organizations.

Funding for this grant started with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Rape Prevention Education grant funds and was given to the N.J. Division on Women’s Rape Prevention Education program. The division then chose the collaborative to hire and organize the statewide group of teens to make the final decision on which nonprofits would get the grants.

As youth experts, the group also shared what they thought organizations should focus on. The discussions led the young teens to share their struggles and relate to similar experiences of marginalized girls in New Jersey and beyond the face. Some girls shared their feelings of being patronized and dismissed when they talked to school administrators and another mentioned holding back her opinions when adults were in the room, according to the collaborative.

“I felt very professional because before I was just learning from a PowerPoint presentation or a book and I felt like I wasn’t doing anything,” Otavalo said. “Like being actually involved in the choice of which organizations will be best for our community is really the outstanding experience that I got from this.”

Now, the girls are working on creating an evaluation component to analyze the long-term impact of the programs they funded. Most recently, Otavalo and her team presented their work at NGO Committee on the Status of Women forum, an annual symposium for nonprofits that runs parallel to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women conference.

Although the program ends in December, Otavalo said the work she’s done so far inspired her to start her own youth leadership club at her high school. Her club will focus on an advocacy project every month starting with a clothing drive in April.

The young teen feels her opportunities have grown since moving to Newark and is looking forward to pursuing a career in humanities or international relations as a result of her work through the program.

“It was very eye-opening,” Otavalo said. “I’ve never been in a program like that before.”

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

NJ home schooling grew amid pandemic

2023-02-09T21:52:52+00:00

The coronavirus shocked New Jersey’s school system, with mandated school shutdowns halting traditional education models. As parents dealt with a global health emergency along with school closures, some turned to home schooling to take control of their children’s education.

The percentage of home-schooled students in New Jersey quadrupled during the 2020-21 school year, according to data released by the state Department of Education. But the number of home-schoolers in the state is only a quarter of a percent of all school students, or about 5,326 students from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Many home schooling advocates applauded this news, pointing to that large increase. But public school union leaders were cautious, warning that the overall number of home-schooled students is so slight that it can’t be used to draw a significant meaning about the state of public education.

“You simply cannot use data from 2020-21 to draw any conclusions about ‘increased interest in home schooling in New Jersey post-pandemic’ because the state was not post-pandemic. We were smack-dab in the raging middle of a pandemic,” said Steven Baker, communications director for the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

But home schooling organizations note that the increases in enrollment seen during the pandemic have not dissipated since public schools reopened. In November 2020, the Princeton Learning Cooperative’s enrollment numbers began increasing dramatically, according to Joel Hammon, co-founder of the “learning community,” which blends in-person classes with the flexibility of home schooling. Hammon said that although some families did return to traditional schooling methods after restrictions were lifted, many stayed.

Shift in perception

Further, advocates note a shift in the perception of alternative schooling methods. Many families were exposed to home schooling for the first time and found it to be beneficial.

Researchers at the University of Boston and the University of Michigan examined that perception shift in a 2021 study that analyzed the pandemic’s effect on public and private schools as well as home schooling. They found that the pandemic “altered families’ attachment to public schooling.”

The increase in home schooling was not in New Jersey alone. In New York City, K-5 students switching to home schooling increased 119% since the 2019-20 school year, based on a Chalkbeat analysis.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s experimental Household Pulse Survey, the number of people nationally that were home schooling at the start of the 2020-2021 school year doubled in comparison to the previous school year.

Home schooling regulations

Despite an increase in interest, home schooling has historically accounted for a small percentage of students, and still does. But for those who engage in the alternative schooling method, what does the process look like?

Home-school laws differ from state to state. In New Jersey, much of the structuring is left up to parents.

All that is required to begin home schooling in New Jersey is to formally withdraw a student from their current school. Notification is not required, and the state has no teacher, assessment or immunization requirements.

In comparison, states such as Pennsylvania — where home schooling is highly regulated — require home-school teachers to have a high school diploma; a notarized affidavit must be filed with the local school superintendent by a certain date, and instructional hours are regulated.

New Jersey requires the home-schooled child to receive “equivalent” teaching instruction. Although “equivalent” does not mean “identical,” parents must follow that ruling. Failure to do so has landed some in legal trouble, according to Scott A. Woodruff, director of legal and legislative advocacy at the Home School Legal Defense Association. Still, parents are free to hand-select materials and education programs.

That hands-off approach, though, does not mean legislators are keeping their hands off the issue. Currently in committee, a bill (A-1041) would mandate inclusivity in extracurricular activities for home-schooled students and include various activities not limited to clubs, sports programs and theatrical productions. As it stands, local boards of education may allow home-schooled students to participate in extracurriculars such as sports but are not required by law to do so.

Astrea Slezak is a digital production assistant at NJ Spotlight News, where this story was first published. NJ Spotlight News is a content partner of Chalkbeat Newark.

Newark parents of children with autism face barriers to care as cases spike in New Jersey

2023-02-07T17:10:16+00:00

Newark families of children with autism may have to travel outside the city to receive care or wait months to receive a diagnosis from a medical professional, as the number of diagnosed cases in the city has surged since 2000.

Researchers at Rutgers University found that as of 2020, 1 in 20 Newark children had been diagnosed with autism, compared with 1 in 167 in 2000.

Statewide, they found, autism rates among 8-year-olds without intellectual disabilities spiked by 500% from 2000 to 2016, and overcall cases among children with intellectual disabilities tripled during the same period.

The study also found disparities in the diagnosis of Black and Latino children, specifically in socially disadvantaged areas like Newark where more services and early intervention programs are needed to treat the disorder effectively.

Researchers said that while autism is becoming more common in New Jersey, the big spikes that showed up in their study were largely due to autism going under-detected in the past among children with average or above-average intellect. They said the data reflected greater awareness of autism, and pointed to the need for better screening and more autism research and services in Newark.

“Until we discover the causes and risk factors for autism, the best thing that we could do is identify the kids who have it as soon as possible and get them into interventions properly,” said co-author Walter Zahorodny, director of the New Jersey Autism Study, a monitoring system set up by Rutgers.

Zahorodny and co-author Josephine Shenouda, an adjunct professor at Rutgers, used biannual data from the New Jersey Autism Study to look at the prevalence of autism among 8-year-olds in Essex, Hudson, Ocean, and Union counties, including patterns based on family wealth and race. By age 8, experts say, most children on the autism spectrum have had a chance to be evaluated by more than one professional.

The study found spikes in all four counties. Amid that surge, children in high income areas were more likely to be diagnosed than those in lower income areas, according to the autism study. Specifically, those living in affluent areas were 80% more likely to be identified with autism and no intellectual disabilities than children in underserved areas. Similarly, Black children with autism and no intellectual disabilities were 30% less likely than white children to be identified.

Half of Newark’s children identified as Black, and 43% as Latino in 2019, according to data from the 2022 Newark Kids Count. By 2018, approximately 9% of boys in Newark had an autism diagnosis, and by 2020, 2.3% of girls had one.

The researchers estimated that as of 2020, about 6% of Black children in the city had an autism diagnosis.

“There are many more children that need to be evaluated, but there’s a supply problem,” Zahorodny said, adding that there are not enough professionals with the training and experience to diagnose children.

The Rutgers team found that children from underserved communities were significantly less likely to get their first professional evaluation before 36 months of age, and therefore less likely to participate in early intervention programs.

Additionally, school districts like Newark are seeing increased demand from families of students with autism and other disabilities for speech therapy and other services. Currently, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School has just one full-time developmental pediatrician for the Newark area, according to Zahorodny.

“I’m pretty sure that none of the school districts have the right or even sufficient number of speech pathologists, physical, occupational therapists, and other experts who can help the child,” Zahorodny said.

Barriers to care in Newark

Before the pandemic shut down schools in 2020, Nyemia Young was seeking help in getting her then 2-year-old son, Nasariah, diagnosed with autism after noticing changes in his development. She remembers calling hospitals in different towns and doctors in neighboring cities for an appointment, only to be told she would have to wait up to 12 months at some locations.

Young was hoping to get Nasariah into an early intervention program, but once the pandemic hit, she had to wait another year to get a proper diagnosis.

“In order for him to get the help, I know I needed to go beyond where I was living to get it,” Young said.

Ultimately, Nasariah was diagnosed in August 2021 at a specialty hospital in the Bronx, more than 20 miles from Young’s home. Despite the distance, Young was relieved to get the diagnosis, which made her son eligible for an early intervention program five days after he turned 3.

“Then the Newark Board (of Education) reached out to me and started giving me all these questionnaires,” Young said. “That made me open my eyes, and I started looking at the different schools in Newark with autism programs.”

Young found support at Nassan’s Place, a Newark community group providing educational and recreational activities for autistic children and their families. The group helped her understand what her son was going through and recommended programs and schools for Nasariah.

Nadine Wright-Arbubakrr, president and founder of Nassan’s Place, said she hears from parents who are frustrated with the months-long wait to see a doctor and the difficulties in navigating the medical system to find help. Language barriers are also a problem for some families.

“Those who have tried to get support are being told they got to wait six to nine months,” Wright-Arbubakrr said. “That’s a valuable time frame, where the children are losing the opportunity to get the resources that will better serve them or better help them with delays.”

Nasariah is now in his second year at the ECC North school, where he receives speech and occupational therapy services to help with his speech delay and day-to-day tasks. Young said she felt lucky to get an early diagnosis for Nasariah but still has to drive to places outside Newark, like the Children’s Specialized Hospital in Union, where her son gets additional occupational therapy services.

This year, Newark Public Schools has 40 speech-language specialists, three occupational therapists, one physical therapist, and one audiologist working at the school level to provide related services to its more than 6,600 students with disabilities, including those with autism. The district also recruited two new outside agencies to provide additional support in occupational, physical, and speech therapy.

But Young said she feels the system is burdensome and plans to move to another state to find better support. She said she hopes the spike in autism cases in New Jersey calls attention to the needs of children like hers.

“I just want to make sure that wherever I go, they have all the things they need for Nasariah,” she said.

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

Newark schools’ crossing guard shortage prompts search for solutions

2022-10-14T15:50:02+00:00

As the school day ends, students at McKinley Elementary School in Newark’s North Ward rush for the exit. Some get into relatives’ cars and head home while other students start their journey home by crossing nearby 7th Avenue with the help of one crossing guard.

With cars zooming by on the busy street at around 2:30 p.m., older students hold hands with their younger siblings as they look both ways before crossing the street. The crossing guard on 7th Avenue holds up his hand, signaling drivers to stop, and lets children cross as he waves goodbye.

The scene may look routine, but it’s not necessarily universal. Over the last couple of years, local advocates have repeatedly raised concerns about the safety of students walking to and from school. “We really need some help here because somebody is going to be killed,” said Sharon Redding, an advocate with the Newark Community Street Team, a nonprofit that focuses on reducing violence in the community.

What often saves students from serious accidents or worse is the presence of crossing guards, who “don’t always get the respect that they really deserve because people just kind of brush them off,” said Newark Police Lieutenant Tremayne Phillips. “It’s easy to neglect them until it’s your kids that are crossing the street.”

Yet hiring people to do that sometimes life-saving work in the city is proving difficult. Schools across New Jersey — including Newark’s — are facing a crossing guard shortage. There are about 170 crossing guard positions in Newark, but only 97 of them were filled as of earlier this month, Phillips said. That’s left the police department rushing to fill 74 of them.

Crossing guards work for the Newark Police Department and are deployed to school zones and intersections near schools to help with students’ daily commutes. They work Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and again from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. to coincide with those commutes.

Last year, 163 pedestrians in New Jersey were killed, according to state law enforcement data. A report released last summer from Smart Growth America, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the rise in people killed while walking is a worsening “epidemic.”

Among the area’s traditional public and charter high schools, Science Park is the only one that has crossing guards on duty for all the available shifts, Phillips said during a virtual public safety roundtable hosted by the Newark Community Street Team on Oct. 11.

For the city’s 30 crossing guard positions assigned to charter schools, only 13 are currently staffed, and for Newark Public Schools, only 83 positions are filled out of 140, Phillips added. Some of the city’s 66 public schools have multiple crossing guard positions for nearby intersections.

A pay hike is one solution New Jersey school officials have turned to. One New Jersey district recently offered up to $50 a day to new crossing guards. Phillips said Newark’s police department offers $15 an hour to crossing guards, although that hourly wage hasn’t changed recently.

But being a crossing guard is a part-time job with no benefits. Phillips said that some new hires leave the job after just a couple of weeks once they find better paying jobs with more hours, benefits, and retirement packages.

In addition, while police officers sometimes fill in temporarily as crossing guards when those positions are vacant, those same officers may get called away to respond to reports of criminal activity, leaving school zones without crossing guards with little or no advance notice.

At the beginning of the school year, the city had used just 72% of its budget allocation for school crossing guards, with 27 applicants still going through the hiring process, according to Sharonda Morris, Newark police’s deputy director of operations.

Solving the crossing guard shortage

Before being hired by the city’s police department, applicants must undergo a criminal background check, which for some people may cause an issue. Any applicant convicted of a crime in the first through fourth degree is automatically disqualified from becoming a crossing guard, according to the police department.

One state lawmaker is trying to get more crossing guard positions filled by working with community leaders. State Sen. Teresa Ruiz, whose district includes Newark, is working on draft legislation and gathering input from the Newark School District, Mayor Ras Baraka, and the Newark Community Street Team to tackle the shortage, although she did not provide specifics about what might be included.

“Around the state and especially here in Newark students rely on crossing guards to get to school safely,” said Ruiz in a statement. “I am working on legislation, alongside the Newark School District, the mayor, and the street team to address the city’s ongoing shortage and bolster the ranks of this critical workforce.”

As part of the Newark Community Street Team’s Safe Passage program, the group’s community outreach workers patrol the streets around several South Ward schools in an effort to keep students safe during their daily commutes. Some of these workers have tried to become crossing guards but cannot, since they were previously incarcerated; these workers also help mediate neighborhood conflicts.

During the Oct. 11 virtual roundtable, Solomon Williams, deputy director for the Newark Community Street Team, said his group is suggesting that Ruiz work to lift a ban to reduce the barrier for those convicted of a crime who want to work as crossing guards. They are also suggesting adding a benefits package and retirement incentive to any future legislation from Ruiz to retain crossing guards.

Advocates like Redding also called on the county’s sheriff’s department to provide support to county roads like Route 602, known as Lyons Avenue, which is used by a number of students in nearby schools like Weequahic High and Carver Elementary.

Other advocates have suggested hiring local college students or high school seniors who may have time before or after school hours and are able to work part time.

Ultimately, the Newark Police Department indicated that most applicants end up getting hired.

“We turn down few people,” Phillips said. “As long as you’re motivated, we’ll hire you.”

Correction: Oct. 25, 2022: A previous version of this story stated that last year, more than 600 pedestrians were killed in New Jersey. The story was updated to reflect the number of pedestrians killed, 163, rather than the total number of deaths due to motor vehicle accidents.

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

Newark water emergency prompts district to cancel summer school for thousands of students

2022-08-09T15:58:07+00:00

The Newark Board of Education canceled summer school Tuesday because of a “city-wide water emergency” stemming from a major water main break at Branch Brook Park, near the city’s border with Belleville.

Residents and establishments throughout Newark and parts of neighboring Belleville, Bloomfield, and Nutley — which all get water from the Newark water supply line — were experiencing low water pressure, discolored water, or had no running water, town officials said.

City health officials advised all residents to boil water before using it.

The summer school cancellation forced thousands of students enrolled in summer school and extended school year programs to stay home on another day of extreme heat.

At the start of summer programming in July, the district said 20,000 Newark students were enrolled in one or more activities. It was unclear how many students were still participating in programs, including extended school year which runs through Aug. 12 for students with a range of special needs.

Around 4,000 Newark students were signed up for mandatory summer school, Superintendent Roger León said at a school board meeting in May.

District officials did not immediately respond to questions.

The city had already activated a “code red” for Tuesday, as temperatures hit the mid-90s that morning and the heat index was expected to reach 101 degrees later that day.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Environmental Protection issued a statewide drought watch that day due to persistent low rainfall this summer on top of record-high temperatures that “continue to stress water supplies throughout the state.”

Families in the North, West, Central, and South wards were all affected by the main break on Clinton and Mill streets in Belleville, Newark city officials said in a statement.

Jasmin Lee Phillips, a resident in the city’s Central Ward, still has water in her home but said the water pressure has been low since early Tuesday morning. Her son Elijah, an autistic 14-year-old, attends the Nassan’s Place summer camp held at George Washington Carver Elementary School, which was also canceled due to the city emergency.

Some residents had their water fully restored on Tuesday, Mayor Ras Baraka said in a statement. However, he did not say how many residents were still without water or provide an estimated time for full restoration.

“Crews are on the scene trying to abate the issue,” posted Council President LaMonica McIver on her Facebook page.

Belleville Mayor Michael Melham said the township’s fire department was working to pump water to Clara Maass Medical Center, which is less than 2 miles from the main break and serves residents from the area.

University Hospital, another hospital near the water supply line, implemented an emergency water conservation plan, canceling clinic visits and elective procedures for the day with limited bottled waters for patients and visitors.

Melham posted a video on Facebook from the scene Tuesday morning which showed water flooding Branch Brook Park Drive, where a river runs parallel.

Newark city officials said in a statement they would be going door-to-door to give out water.

City officials also said residents experiencing a water emergency should call the city’s Division of Water Supply at 973-733-3654. But the influx of calls caused that number to give a busy signal throughout the day.

Some charter schools, including KIPP Newark schools, had professional development sessions scheduled for teachers on Tuesday as they prepare for the new school year starting next week. The schools pivoted to virtual sessions for the day, KIPP NJ spokeswoman Jessica Shearer said in an email.

Many residents took to social media to share their experiences with the water outage during another hot day.

Some commented on the city’s Facebook updates about their elderly parents who were in need of water. Others said that bottled water delivered by city representatives to multi-family households was not sufficient. One woman said she was in need of clean water to make her baby’s formula.

And some residents were able to find a way to cope with the water emergency. Lee Phillips said she and other parents in her son’s summer camp decided to treat their kids to an outing instead of staying home.

“I had to tell my son summer camp was canceled, he was like, ‘but why?’ “ Lee Phillips said. “But then one of the other parents say ‘hey, what about we take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese?’ So, that’s the plan.”

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark, covering the city’s K-12 schools. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.

Newark students get paid to learn and work in the metaverse this summer

2022-08-04T18:25:26+00:00

Dante Hernandez, a rising ninth grader at Technology High School, never imagined that an Oculus headset would be his way of getting to work.

This summer, it is – and his office is in the virtual world.

While some teens find jobs in retail or restaurants, Hernandez and 50 other Newark students are spending their vacation from school in an immersive reality called the metaverse, a virtual version of everything you can do in real life. For six weeks, students learn the skills to code, develop virtual software, and find ways to put their new knowledge to the test.

“We enter a virtual building and everything’s there for us. We just start learning,” Hernandez said. “This kind of opened our eyes more to see, like, what the metaverse has in store for us in the future.”

This summer, roughly 3,000 Newark students between the ages of 14 to 24 are working in career and technical education-related jobs as part of Newark’s summer youth employment program. The city places and pays students each year in a variety of summer jobs and internships where they get hands-on experience that provides them the skills to reach future career goals.

The push to provide more career and technical education has grown over the years, especially as the pandemic has forced schools to search for new ways to engage students who have disconnected from learning. State and local leaders have also noted the importance of having more of these programs for high school students looking for opportunities after graduation.

Newark students put their skills to their test by entering the metaverse and developing code for their own work projects.

According to the New Jersey Department of Education, approximately 77,000 high school students in the state participate in career and technical education pathways. Experts say students in these pathways have a 10% higher high school graduation rate than those who are not.

State and local officials are also pushing for more opportunities for students.

Last week, Gov. Phil Murphy awarded school districts and county colleges a second round of grant funding through the Securing Our Children’s Future Bond Act. The grants will fund improvements and enhancements of career and technical education programs in county vocational-technical school districts and county colleges throughout New Jersey.

This year, Newark’s summer program launched its virtual reality track with 51 students who had little to no experience in virtual reality.

Cody Piggot runs the virtual reality program and creates projects and lessons for the students. He gets help from another Newark Public Schools alum, Davina George, who helps students on a day-to-day basis.

Ayomide Adekoya will be a senior at Science Park High School this year and says the program is giving him a head start in the tech field.

“I feel like this program has sort of given us an advantage,” Adekoya said. “We’ve been able to meet a person in the space and being able to see someone succeed in the field also provides a form of motivation for us.”

The program partners with nearly 100 university and business communities, nonprofit organizations, and city government departments to place students in jobs throughout Newark. The Newark Workforce Development Board, which oversees the city’s youth program, funded the group's Oculus headsets, laptops and food.

Marsha Armstrong, the city’s youth program director, puts job seekers through a rigorous interview process before being selected and matched with an employer.

The program is meant to give students “real-world experience” and prepare them for future jobs, Armstrong said. Interested participants are required to fill out an application online and submit their resumes before they reach the interview stage.

After that, Armstrong and other program leaders interview students, and selected applicants are placed in positions in local hospitals and nonprofit organizations. The city also launched its first construction and building track as part of the summer jobs program.

“We have people just really coming to the table trying to figure out how they can help young people,” Armstrong added.

The program also provides practical education for students, including financial literacy courses every Friday and support for families of those participating. Sometimes, students’ home life may interfere with their work but Armstrong says the goal is to encourage them to get ahead.

“Even if it’s not sometimes just a paycheck, it’s tears and a hug,” Armstrong added. “It’s just helping them know that people in their community are rooting for them and no matter what, we’re not going to allow them to fall.”

Aside from hands-on experience, students get the chance to learn something new during the summer and stay busy. Shamere Holifield, a soon-to-be senior at Weequahic High School, said he would spend his summer playing basketball if it wasn’t for the program. Others such as Ridwanulahi Banjoko said they’re using the opportunity to invest in their future.

Learning how to code can be difficult, Banjoko said, “but you got people to help you learn this for free.”

While money is a factor for some families, Lisbeth Soto Leyba, who will be a senior at Donald Payne School of Technology this fall, said the summer program has allowed her to introduce her family to a field they never imagined she could work in.

“My mom at first was skeptical. She said what is this gonna do for you?” Soto said. “But so far, she’s like, actually liking the idea because I tell her every day the things that we do here and how my day is going.”

During last year’s budget meeting, Newark Public Schools superintendent Roger León said this year’s budget would include facility upgrades to enhance career and technical education for the district’s six comprehensive high schools including East Side, Barringer, Central, Shabazz, Weequahic, and West Side. León did not specify what those facility upgrades would be.

The city’s summer youth employment program runs through August and program leaders hope students in its inaugural virtual reality class will transfer their skills to the real world.

“Our goal is to produce talent in our cohort of 50 that become developers for big companies in the tech space,” Piggot said. “Virtual reality is the future.”

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

Newark summer camp helps autistic kids and their families connect

2022-07-28T10:45:00+00:00

In a few weeks, 14-year-old Elijah Lee will start high school. It’s a big transition for any teen, but especially for Elijah, who has autism. His mother says he is excited to go to a new school with new students and different teachers, but she is worried the transition to a larger school might have a negative impact on his academic and emotional progress.

In the meantime, Jasmine Lee Phillips is happy that Elijah has been able to connect with other teens through activities such as building LEGOs and learning how to play the piano during his second summer at Nassan’s Place, a Newark community group providing educational and recreational activities for autistic children and their families.

“I think I have the hardest part transitioning,” said Lee Phillips, who’s worked at her son’s middle school in previous years, about Elijah going to high school. “I’m not there; I haven’t worked there before. I don’t know what it’s like.”

Autistic students at Nassan’s Place summer program learn to draw and paint during arts and crafts.

Like other school systems nationwide, Newark Public Schools has struggled to provide adequate services for its special education students — last year, the district served 6,527 students, nearly 17% of the total student enrollment. During the summer, some schools host programs for elementary and high school students who have disabilities including autism, auditory impairment, intellectual disabilities, and emotional regulation impairment. But a lack of trust in programming and staff shortages combined with negative experiences from remote learning have left many parents looking for summer services outside what the district offers.

Nadine Wright-Arbubakrr is the president and founder of Nassan’s Place and the parent of soon-to-be 18-year-old Nassan, who also has autism. She started the organization almost 10 years ago so parents wouldn’t have to struggle to find affordable services and programs like she did.

“There hasn’t been a place where our babies can go,” Wright-Arbubakrr said. “Some parents get overwhelmed and feel like they can’t. You must create your own village.”

Wright-Arbubakrr coordinates the seven-week paid summer camp, which is currently at capacity serving 25 students with 20 more on the waiting list. This is the second year she’s run it with help from the city, which provided financial support and a space at George Washington Carver Elementary School for the camp. More than half the students come from Newark Public Schools and the program also serves students from Orange. Nassan’s Place provides year-round outings and events including a Saturday basketball camp for children and adults on the autism spectrum and day trips to local parks.

Last year, Elijah’s middle school teacher decided not to teach at the school-run summer camp he usually attends. That prompted Lee Phillips to look into alternatives. She heard of Nassan’s Place through word of mouth.

Elijah, 14, and Khalil, 9, are students at the Nassan’s Place summer camp, a nonprofit aimed at providing educational and recreational activities for children with autism.

“I don’t trust a whole bunch of people with my kids, especially with my Elijah. But I trust them,” the mother of two said. “I trust them enough to leave him, come home, and wait to pick him back up at 4 o’clock. He’ll be going every year until he can’t.”

The summer program runs until mid-August and keeps kids busy by taking them on field trips to a bowling alley, reinforcing educational and sensory learning by doing arts and crafts, and teaching them to be more independent. Wright-Arbubakrr recruits and vets volunteers to help chaperone outings.

“If I don’t trust them with Nassan, I don’t trust them with the kids here,” Wright-Arbubakrr.

Local businesses and community organizations support the program by donating meals and movie tickets and lending their time.

Shalene Willis is the mother of Khalil, a 9-year-old autistic boy who also attends the Nassan’s Place summer program and events throughout the year. She and her wife moved to Newark three years ago and struggled with getting Khalil adequate instruction during the pandemic. Willis didn’t know other parents going through similar experiences and was weary of leaving Khalil in the care of others. But since joining the summer program at Nassan’s Place, it has given her family a community they trust and can relate to.

“You become friends with those parents and your kids make friends where they wouldn’t normally make friends,” she said.

Elizabeth Athos, an attorney with the Education Law Center who focuses on issues related to special education, said New Jersey continues to be at “the bottom of the list” for serving families and children with disabilities. Her organization is one of several state advocacy groups that have spent years fighting for legal relief to help families with children on the autism spectrum. Those students were especially affected by the disruptions caused by COVID.

“There have been so many challenges for school districts and different sorts of families that honestly, I don’t know the extent to which a district and families have been able to catch their breath and plan for the upcoming year,” Athos said. “I’m sure there’s a lot of variability in how well it’s being done.”

Nuri is a student at Nassan’s Place summer program for autistic children, where he receives educational support.

Newark has pledged to focus more of its resources on providing support to the special needs community in the area. During a ceremony earlier this month, Newark officials unveiled the city’s first park designed with a separate section with sensory play equipment for children with autism and special needs. At the unveiling, Mayor Ras Baraka said the city “has been woefully inadequate” in providing aid for children with special needs and pledged to improve things with input from Wright-Arbubakrr, who has advocated for more services.

“None of this happens without Nadine having a conversation with me and us about what we need to do for kids on the spectrum here in the City of Newark,” said Baraka. “We’ve been woefully inadequate for a long period of time not just here but in the state of New Jersey.”

The Newark Public School district is also planning on allocating more resources for its special education programs this year. During last year’s budget hearing, Newark Superintendent Roger Leon said the district would partner with local organizations such as Rutgers ABA Center and STAR Autism to provide more services.

“We have brilliant partnerships that are already underway, and we’ll be aggressively redefining the work that we are doing for our most neediest students,” said Leon during the budget presentation.

The parents whose children attend Nassan’s Place are eager to see changes and grateful their children have found fun this summer.

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

Money for college? Newark helps students tackle the complex federal aid form

2020-01-18T00:24:09+00:00

Filling out the federal student aid application is challenging even for savvy parents. For those who aren’t native English speakers, the complicated form can be mind-boggling. Thanks to volunteers and an organized campaign in Newark, more families can now tackle the form.

The Newark FAFSA Challenge is a collaborative effort that local organizations, government officials, and school administrators launched in October to help students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which makes them eligible to receive federal grants, work-study, and loans. Last year, 2,094 of Newark’s 3,519 graduating students completed their applications.

“I know all my friends want to have a post-secondary education, and I know it’s a struggle for them to think about going to college because they don’t think they can get past the high school phase,“ said senior Yinett Rodriguez, who volunteered at an event at Barringer High last week to help students fill out the FAFSA. “Most of the students here don’t speak much English. I’m bilingual. I always encourage them to complete their FAFSA anyway.”

Only about 35% of Newark high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of January, said Reginald Lewis, executive director of the Newark City of Learning Collaborative, one of the organizers of the challenge. He hopes that percentage will get closer to the campaign’s goal of 70% with other events scheduled in coming months.

Nationally, about 60% of students completed the form last year, while Newark Public Schools had an average completion rate of 63.3%. Campaign organizers hope that helping students will result in a 10% increase in completion rates in Newark by June.

“It’s very clear that high schools with high rates of students of color and low-income students have low FAFSA filing rates,” said Ellie Bruecker, a fifth-year doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches FAFSA filing. “Lots of those students are eligible but don’t fill out their FAFSA. Filing rates are higher at wealthier schools, where they might not be eligible for federal aid.”

More than one out of four Newark residents lives in poverty. Poor students also are far less likely than their wealthy peers to earn college degrees, and just 19% of Newarkers have college degrees, compared with 45% of New Jersey residents and 40% of U.S. adults.

Students often don’t complete their federal aid application because they think they’re ineligible for financial aid or don’t know how to complete the form. And even after students submit their application, problems can arise, especially if they are from immigrant families.

“If something is unclear in your FAFSA, you’re flagged to verify it,” Bruecker said. “That process has to be more challenging to verify for students who don’t have parents who attended college in the United States or students with parents who didn’t complete their taxes.”

“The challenge we’re having right now is that I think there are a lot of parents who come to the United States from other countries who don’t have some paperwork,” said Barringer parent liaison Charles Shepherd. “So students don’t have the information or proper documents to fill the forms out.”

He said about 50 of the 450 seniors at Barringer have started filling out their federal aid application for the next school year.

Even though the FAFSA is offered in Spanish, most of the six families who attended Tuesday’s event needed translators to complete their application. The Newark City of Learning Collaborative trained bilingual volunteers to help students, Lewis said.

“The form is really complicated for native English speakers. It’s complicated for me, and I’ve been studying it for five years,” Bruecker said. “Trying to navigate it when English is not your native language I would imagine is incredibly difficult.”

As more colleges experiment with online remediation, some students flourish while many others fall behind

2019-12-16T03:47:19+00:00

On the first day of her first college math class, JaniQua Guiste chose a seat near the front of a computer lab at Rutgers University-Newark. Right at 10 a.m., the instructor looked up from her computer.

“Good morning, students,” she said that sunny morning this September. “How are you today?”

Guiste hadn’t been surprised to test into Math 104, or “Intermediate Algebra,” a remedial class that begins with whole numbers and fractions before moving into linear equations and rational expressions. It was material she might have mastered in 11th-grade Algebra 2 at her Newark high school had the teacher not quit the second week, leaving the class with a rotating cast of substitutes.

“In math, I knew I wasn’t going to be prepared,” said Guiste, a native of the U.S. Virgin Islands who moved to Newark in 2017 after Hurricane Irma leveled her family’s home.

Now her math instructor was telling students to log onto their computers and register for ALEKS, an online program that would play the role of co-teacher. A few minutes later, a student in her 30s asked if they would use a workbook along with ALEKS.

“We don’t have a workbook,” the instructor replied. “Everything is online.”

That comment would shape the semester for Guiste and thousands of other students in remedial courses across the country, where more than 40% of public colleges have turned to online and other self-paced programs to help their most struggling students get up to speed in math.

Unlike lecture courses, online programs allow students to plug away at their own speed on problems matched to their individual learning needs — a format that works well for some students. But there are also pitfalls to that approach.

Students who arrive with the biggest gaps in their learning can easily fall behind in computer-based courses — especially students “who don’t have great study skills and aren’t super self-directed,” said Maggie Fay, a researcher who has studied such classes. And even in supervised courses like Guiste’s, the instructors can struggle to catch students who veer off track.

“The theory of action on online remediation sounds very promising,” said Fay, who is a research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But most of the independent research has “not shown super strong outcomes.”

Turning to tech

The rise of computer-based remediation is one response to a longstanding crisis in higher education: Many of the students who enter college furthest behind never catch up.

This year, Chalkbeat reporters in Newark and Detroit are examining whether students from struggling schools are prepared for college — and whether colleges are prepared for them. Catch up on the Ready or Not series here.

Those students are typically placed in remedial classes, which cover material often taught in high school or earlier. Remediation allows community colleges and less-selective four-year institutions to serve under-prepared students who might otherwise be shut out of higher education.

But what was intended as an on-ramp to college often becomes a parking lot: About half of remedial course-takers at community colleges and roughly 40% at four-year institutions never complete the courses, according to a 2016 federal study, which found that black, Hispanic, and low-income students were overrepresented in remediation. Stymied by the courses, many students leave college with debt and dashed hopes instead of degrees.

Those dismal outcomes have sparked a national reform movement, with colleges and entire states taking steps to send fewer students to remediation or allow them to skip it entirely. At the same time, many have overhauled the way they deliver remediation to students who need it — in many cases, with the help of technology.

ALEKS’s online math program

Today, more than 40% of four-year public colleges now offer self-paced remedial math classes that often rely heavily on computers, according to a recent report by the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness. A new effort backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to bring the “adaptive learning” technology that powers many of those classes to 200 more colleges in the coming years.

Adaptive learning programs like ALEKS make an alluring promise: college, but “personalized.” Instead of survey courses in anonymous lecture halls, students get customized online lessons with material adapted to their needs.

“When I’m teaching a lecture, I’m teaching you something whether you already know it or not,” said Robert Puhak, who directs college algebra and basic math at Rutgers-Newark and oversees the ALEKS classes. “This is just going after the things you don’t know.”

Theory of action

In Guiste, Rutgers-Newark had found an ideal student for its computer-based math class.

She prefers working online over copying notes off a whiteboard. She isn’t afraid to flag down the instructor when a problem baffles her. She’s meticulous about completing her assignments, which she lists on a weekly calendar in her dorm room. And she likes learning from ALEKS.

“It breaks down every step,” she said. “It has a problem, then it has an answer to the problem — like a whole explanation.”

Adaptive programs allow students to skip topics they already know and focus on those they don’t. At Rutgers-Newark, students work through practice problems individually as an instructor stands by to answer questions and teach brief lessons when needed. To advance to a new topic, students must answer several questions correctly.

"The whole purpose is that it's going to teach you things you don't know."

To do all that, ALEKS must first determine what students know. So during that first session of Math 104 in September, the students took an online “Knowledge Check” that assessed their grasp of the 341 topics covered in the first portion of the class. ALEKS returned the results immediately: One student in the back row who raced through the quiz understood 151 of the topics; two seats over, his classmate knew only 69.

The instructor told the class not to stress: “The whole purpose is that it’s going to teach you things you don’t know.”

A commuter campus situated in the heart of the city, Rutgers-Newark proudly educates a wide array of students — including about 15% who hail from Newark. That commitment to diversity also means that many students arrive needing some remediation.

Rutgers University-Newark

That has not always gone well. A 2003 report by external evaluators said Rutgers-Newark had “a very weak developmental program.” (Some researchers and college administrators refer to “developmental” rather than remedial education, which they believe has negative connotations.)

Since then, Rutgers-Newark has ramped up student supports such as tutoring, advising, and financial aid, while condensing remedial math into a single semester (a move shown to boost completion rates) and hiring full-time faculty members to teach remedial classes instead of part-time instructors. And in 2015, the campus began using ALEKS for remedial math.

The promise of personalized learning has captivated many colleges. In 2018, nearly 2 million college students used ALEKS, one of several online programs on the market.

Yet the limited research on computer-based remediation has found mixed outcomes for “hybrid” courses like those at Rutgers-Newark, where students use online programs in computer labs under the guidance of instructors.

In Tennessee, students at four-year colleges who took remedial math on computers were more likely to pass the course than students in lecture classes but less likely to pass their first college-level math class, according to a new study. And in Kentucky, community college students who took computer-based remediation were less likely to pass the course and less likely to earn degrees than students in traditional classes, according to a recent peer-reviewed study.

“We have seen a lot of colleges move quickly towards adopting these computer-based instructional models” for remediation, said Angela Boatman, a higher-education professor at Boston College who conducted the Tennessee study. The limited rigorous research to date, she added, raises the possibility that “this is not the solution that colleges had hoped it would be.”

Still, some colleges have seen improvements after turning to tech. McGraw-Hill Education, the publisher that owns ALEKS, points to several case studies suggesting positive outcomes at institutions that use its program.

For instance, Arizona State University and a Milwaukee community college both found that students who used ALEKS were more likely to pass basic math courses than students in traditional classes. The studies were conducted by people at those institutions or researchers connected to McGraw-Hill; neither looked at students’ later outcomes.

“They’re seeing these improvements they just haven’t been able to see in the classic models,” said Scott Virkler, chief product and operations officer at McGraw-Hill Higher Education. ALEKS, he added, “works exceptionally well for remediation.”

‘They were really lost’

Essex County College had hoped online remediation would deliver the miracle it needed.

A community college adjacent to Rutgers-Newark, Essex is a top destination for Newark residents seeking better lives — some fresh out of high school, others returning to the classroom after long absences. Nearly 43% of graduates from Newark’s non-selective high schools enroll at Essex, compared to about 3% at Rutgers-Newark, according to a recent study.

Like most two-year colleges, Essex accepts anyone who applies. The vast majority of incoming students must take at least one remedial class, but few make it out. In math, less than 7% of students who start in the lowest level of remediation ultimately pass a college-level math course.

“Developmental math is a swamp where a lot of people never escape,” said Douglas Walcerz, a former vice president at Essex.

Essex County College

Walcerz was convinced that the format of remedial math was fatally flawed. No instructor could give a lesson that met the needs of students whose math skills ranged from an 11th-grade to a fourth-grade level, he said.

So in 2013, Walcerz brought in ALEKS. Using federal funds and a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation, Essex piloted a new remedial math course where students met in computer labs three days a week to work online with guidance from instructors. Two days a week, they took a mandatory study-skills class where they set weekly goals for topics to complete in ALEKS.

When students took a diagnostic exam at the beginning of the course that fall, the results confirmed Walcerz’s suspicion about the huge variation among students: The least prepared knew less than 5% of the course topics, while the most prepared knew more than 70%.

"Developmental math is a swamp where a lot of people never escape."

ALEKS enabled a small number of students to zip ahead, finishing the class early or completing two courses in one semester. But others were left in the dust. Pass rates plummeted in the classes that used ALEKS the first year, which Walcerz later called “disastrous.” However, the ALEKS students who did pass were slightly more likely to make it through college-level math than their peers who took regular remedial classes, said Walcerz, now a dean at Brazosport College in Texas.

The results were also disappointing at other colleges and universities that received Gates funding to experiment with adaptive-learning programs. A 2016 Gates-commissioned study that reviewed data from 14 institutions found the technology did not generally improve course completion, and only led to modest learning gains at three institutions. “The ultimate goal — better student outcomes at lower cost — remains elusive,” the report concluded. (Chalkbeat receives some funding from Gates.)

In 2016, Essex abandoned ALEKS.

Brooke Orosz, an assistant professor of math and physics at Essex, said it had been hard for instructors to keep tabs on a room full of students each practicing different topics online. And without group work, students had few opportunities to learn from their peers. That placed a heavy burden on students to learn the material themselves using ALEKS and to seek help when they got stuck.

“It seemed like a third of the class was doing great with it and the other two-thirds didn’t really know what to do,” she said. “They were really lost.”

Today, the college is planning a number of research-backed reforms that don’t rely on technology. Those include using multiple measures instead of a single test to determine if students need remediation, embedding tutors in some remedial classes, and piloting a college-level “co-requisite” course covering statistics and related algebra so students can skip a semester of remedial algebra.

“We really believe that if we could help students get through developmental math,” said Jill Stein, the dean who oversees math and other subjects, “it would have a huge impact on retention and graduation.”

The human component

At first, Math 104 was a breeze for Guiste.

She had attended a summer “boot camp” at Rutgers-Newark that gave low-income, less academically prepared students a crash course in surviving college. During the program, she took a math class where she learned concepts also covered in the first weeks of Math 104.

But as the fall semester wore on, the material grew more challenging and the pace more grueling. The class included weekly quizzes on top of the ALEKS practice problems. To keep up, Guiste tried to master six topics per day — a goal that required correctly answering dozens of practice problems, often late at night in her dorm room.

In class, she mostly learned alone. Unlike during the summer, she and her classmates didn’t get to work through problems together at the whiteboard. The instructor gave brief lessons, but Guiste often found them confusing — especially when the topics differed from the ones in Guiste’s customized ALEKS course.

She could usually figure out how to solve problems by poring over the examples that ALEKS gave. But because cost constraints had kept Rutgers-Newark from purchasing a textbook or instructional videos to supplement ALEKS, Guiste often turned to Google and YouTube when a concept stumped her.

“What’s the point of being in the class with a teacher if you’re going to teach yourself with ALEKS?” she said one dreary afternoon in October.

In class one morning that month, it was clear that Guiste wasn’t the only student teaching herself.

"What's the point of being in the class with a teacher if you're going to teach yourself with ALEKS?"

The students were scheduled to take a quiz on linear equations — their seventh quiz in six weeks. The following week would bring more quizzes and an exam, plus all the ALEKS questions for the first portion of class would be due. Yet when class started at 10 a.m., only seven of 23 students were present in the computer lab.

The instructor wrote a practice problem on the board — ¾ x – ⅔ = ⅙ — then briskly narrated the steps to solve it. But hardly anyone watched. Instead, students stared intently at their computers, some with their hoods up or headphones on to drown out distractions. They worked on a practice quiz or problems in ALEKS. A couple students raised their hands to request help with their ALEKS problems. Sitting in the front row, Guiste asked when they could start the quiz.

Around 10:30, it began. One student who wasn’t in the room tried accessing the quiz remotely.

“Someone’s trying to trick me,” the instructor said. (The instructor allowed Chalkbeat to observe her class multiple times on the condition that she not be named.)

About 30 minutes later, most students had completed the quiz’s eight problems. Circulating through the room, the instructor saw that one young man had answered three problems incorrectly.

“What happened? We just did this on the board. You weren’t listening?” she asked him. “I came in late,” said the student, Jake Lakatos.

That quiz was an exception for Lakatos. He had earned perfect scores on most of the other quizzes, which covered material he recalled learning at his high school in a middle-class township south of Newark. For him, the format of the class was ideal.

“I listen in if there is something I need help with,” he said about the instructor’s lessons. “But most of the time, I’m just kind of tuned out and going ahead on the computer.”

Jillian Rock

But that approach fell short for students such as Jillian Rock, who asked about workbooks on the first day of class. A writer and visual artist, she had taken classes at other colleges before enrolling at Rutgers-Newark and placing into remedial math.

As Rock progressed slowly through ALEKS, relearning concepts she hadn’t used in years, she bumped up against the faster pace of the course. One day, she had to pause her online work on fractions to take a class quiz on geometry. Meanwhile, she missed learning from peers and her professor as she had in previous math classes.

“There’s no human component to this,” she said, “and I think that’s where I struggle.”

Eventually she dropped the course. She planned to retake it later — in a lecture format.

Teaching with ALEKS

Instructors are expected to play a pivotal role in hybrid classes like Guiste’s, harnessing the software to track students’ progress and swoop in strategically.

“ALEKS does not replace the teacher,” said Virkler of McGraw-Hill Higher Education. “The teacher is the most important thing — that doesn’t change.”

"ALEKS does not replace the teacher"

Programs like ALEKS can provide instructors with a powerful tool. With a few clicks, they can see how long a student was logged into the program, what problems they got wrong, and how many attempts it took to get the right answers. Armed with that data, instructors know “where to spend your time and energy and where each student is having their unique set of challenges,” Virkler said.

But successfully making use of the data requires time and training that are often in short supply.

Jonathan Guhl-Miller, a part-time instructor at Rutgers-Newark who teaches Math 104 and other classes, said ALEKS’s trove of data is only useful if instructors can sort through it all.

“It does require an enormous amount of paying attention to the extra tools” to monitor each person’s progress in a class of 20 or more students, he said.

Data analysis is just one of many skills required to teach alongside a computer. Instructors must keep everyone on track even as students work at their own pace. And they must intervene seamlessly, pivoting from private coaching one minute to a whole-class lesson the next.

“It’s a new type of challenge,” said Puhak, the Rutgers-Newark math director who oversees ALEKS classes. “You have to be savvy as to who knows what — and more so — where does each individual need help and then how can you best do that.”

Puhak said he hopes to offer instructors more training in teaching strategies, which college faculty across the country often never receive. He’s inspired by seeing what computer-centered remedial classes look like when led by expert educators — like Wahab Ashraf.

Wahab Ashraf

Ashraf, who graduated from Rutgers-Newark and also teaches honors biology at a Newark high school, has taught Math 104 for several years. During one of his evening classes last month, he seemed to fuse the interactive, supportive structure of high school with the more independent approach of college.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said as students took their seats in the computer lab. “Hello, professor,” several replied.

Like Guiste’s class the previous month, Ashraf’s students were preparing for a quiz the next day. But Ashraf’s review looked completely different. He asked students to pair up and solve a series of practice problems. While they worked, he scanned their calculations and pointed out mistakes or asked a student from one pair to explain a concept to a different duo.

In the third row, a young man walked his partner through the steps for using an equation to find the area of a rectangle. She followed his guidance and got the right answer.

Only after Ashraf called students to the board to show how they solved the problems did he allow independent work on computers.

“ALEKS just gives them notes — it maps out the steps, but sometimes they can’t see how ALEKS goes from one step to the next,” Ashraf said, adding that is why group work and the instructor’s lessons are invaluable. “It’s a huge benefit to just have someone there to help guide their learning.”

Making classes like Ashraf’s into the norm could be a challenge. Guhl-Miller said that while he does give some lectures in Math 104, that is complicated by the fact that students are “working on different topics at different times” in ALEKS. He also offers extra assistance to anyone who needs it during or after class, he added. But ultimately, he said, students must take responsibility for their own learning.

“This is the college level; we are not looking over their shoulder all the time,” he said. “If they don’t realize they need help and they won’t accept my help, then they’re going to struggle and fail.”

Preparing for what’s next

By one measure, Rutgers-Newark’s remedial math program is working for most students. On average 75% of students pass Math 104 and Math 105, which enrolls students who score slightly higher on the placement test but still require remediation.

But experts say the real test of remediation is whether it prepares students to succeed in college-level classes — and on that front, Rutgers-Newark has a mixed record. In the 2017-18 school year, up to 90% of students who completed remedial math passed Math 106, a liberal arts course that does not involve algebra, according to administrators. But just 50-57% of remedial math completers made it through Math 109, college-level algebra for business and science.

“We have to keep evaluating what we’re doing and adapting our techniques, our models, to better serve students,” Puhak said.

JaniQua Guiste

Other colleges that rely on computer-based remediation should do the same, said Nikki Edgecombe, principal investigator for the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness.

Despite evidence of “weak outcomes” for some students in online courses, colleges, philanthropies, and tech companies are unlikely to abandon an approach they’ve invested heavily in, she added. So instead, researchers and practitioners should find improvements.

“We need to figure that out,” Edgecombe said. “Because otherwise, it’s a space where we’re going to exacerbate inequity.”

For her part, Guiste is determined to finish Math 104 and tackle the more advanced algebra she’ll need to earn a degree and, one day, become a dentist.

"We need to figure that out. Because otherwise, it's a space where we're going to exacerbate inequity."

So around 4 p.m. one afternoon in early December, with the final exam less than two weeks away, she found a quiet lounge in her dorm and pulled up ALEKS on her laptop. She realized that between class and her campus job as an office assistant, she had never eaten lunch. Yet she kept working.

She took a practice quiz in ALEKS, then read and reread its explanation of a problem she got wrong on graphing a line. It still didn’t make sense, so she resolved to ask a friend in higher-level math for help.

Thinking back that afternoon on her long slog through Math 104, she decided the hard work had been worth it: “I feel like all of it is going to prepare us for what’s next.” But first, she needed to pass.

“I just really hope and pray,” she said.

This project was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Newark launches citywide campaign to increase the number of students applying for federal college aid

2019-10-31T21:13:58+00:00

More than half of Newark high school seniors completed their applications for federal student aid last year and raked in $45 million in scholarships, according to the district, but the city wants even more students to receive money for college.

Local organizations, government officials, and school administrators announced a new collaborative effort Thursday called the Newark FAFSA Challenge that aims to increase the percentage of Newark students completing the federal aid application, which makes students eligible to receive grants, work-study, and loans.

Next week the campaign will be launching hub sites throughout Newark offering resources and FAFSA assistance to students and families. Newark schools currently host FAFSA completion nights, according to Reginald Lewis, executive director of the Newark City of Learning Collaborative, a public-private partnership focused on increasing college attainment in Newark, and through this campaign, volunteers will provide additional assistance at those events.

Organizers hope the campaign will result in a 10 percent increase in FAFSA completion rates among Newark students, from a 60% completion rate this past June — a percentage that’s flush with the national rate — to 70% in June 2020. Lewis predicts Newark students will receive an additional $3 million or more if that goal is met.

“A lot of our families look at the cost of college today and react in shock, but they qualify for state and federal financial aid,” Lewis said. “We have too many families starting the process and not completing it.”

Research shows that low-income students — presumably the students who need financial aid the most — tend to apply for aid less often than other students due to a number of barriers, and that poor students are far less likely than their wealthy peers to earn college degrees.

The challenge aligns with the Newark City of Learning Collaborative’s long-standing goal of increasing the number of Newarkers with college degrees. Just 19% have college degrees, compared to 45%of New Jersey residents and 40% of Americans.

Nationally, a majority of high school seniors who complete the FAFSA immediately enroll in college. Other cities and states around the country also host their own FAFSA challenges, including nearby New York.

Last year, 2,094 of Newark’s 3,519 graduating students completed their applications. Lewis said that 400 students have already submitted their FAFSAs as of this month.

“We need to get more of our students into college,” Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said. “Whatever we can do to make sure our kids get to college is what we need to do.”