Chalkbeat

Newark Board of Education 2024 election results: Voters pick incumbents backed by mayor

2024-04-17T05:16:00+00:00

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Incumbents Dawn Haynes and Vereliz Santana and their running mates, Helena Vinhas and Kanileah Anderson, appeared headed to victory in Tuesday’s Newark school board election, in which fewer than 2.8% of voters participated, according to preliminary results.

All four candidates are part of the mayoral-backed “Moving Newark Schools Forward” slate, whose candidates have won every school board election since 2016. Santana and Vinhas each received 22% of the vote, according to preliminary results, while Haynes received roughly 20%. Anderson ran unopposed in her bid to complete the rest of her one-year term.

If the leading candidates hold on to win, the nine-member board would be composed entirely of members who ran for election as part of the “Moving Newark Schools Forward” slate.

First-time candidate Debra Salters trailed the four-member slate with 11.3%. Returning candidate Che’ J.T. Colter ran alongside newcomer Muta El-Amin on the “It Takes a Village” slate, a duo of community advocates who each received roughly 3%. Returning candidate Latoya Jackson received 6.3%, while two-time candidates Sheila Montague and Jimmie White garnered 8.3% and 2.7%, respectively.

Voters were choosing three candidates to serve three-year terms on the school board, along with Anderson, who was appointed to the board to fill a vacant seat and running to stay for the rest of her term.

As of 9:34 p.m. on Tuesday, Essex County results showed that out of 163,713 registered voters in Newark, just 4,626 voted in the school board election, which determines who sets policies for New Jersey’s largest school system, and its roughly 40,000 students. The board is also tasked with holding the superintendent accountable and, last month, approved a $1.5 billion budget.

During the day, residents reported low turnout at polling sites across the city’s five wards. Historically, voter turnout for the annual school board election has been low, typically around 3% to 4%. In last year’s election, just over 3% of Newark voters participated.

The Oliver Street Elementary School polling site was quiet at noon on Tues., April 16, 2024 in Newark, New Jersey.

At Oliver Street Elementary School, in the Ironbound section of Newark, few people turned up to vote early in the day. Poll workers at the school said fewer than five people had shown up to vote by 2 p.m.

“I had no idea that was happening,” said parent Patricia Miraflor in Spanish, as she looked at a candidate flyer taped to a pole across the street.

Outside the school, signs that read “vote here” in English and Spanish hung outside a black gate leading people up a ramp and to the entrance of the voting site.

More than 90 churches, senior centers, and schools across the city’s five wards opened their doors at 6 a.m. on Election Day to serve as polling places. Despite being open until 8 p.m. on Tuesday, many sites only saw a slow trickle of voters throughout the day.

Lifelong Newark resident Barbara Howell knows the stakes are high for the school board race but feels disappointed with voter turnout every year. Howell said she mailed in her ballot last week.

“I saw a few of the candidates stop by senior centers but I didn’t really know them or what they’ve done here,” said Howell on Tuesday.

Newark anticipated a new wave of voters this year after the City Council unanimously approved an ordinance to lower the voting age to 16 for school board elections. But those voters will not participate until next year’s election due to state and county delays in getting voter registration machines ready by April.

Candidate signs hang outside Mt. Zion Baptist Church, a polling site on Tuesday in Newark.

In the North Ward, the polling site located in the basement of Roberto Clemente Elementary School saw four voters by 12:45 p.m. A few blocks away, Mount Zion Baptist Church saw 14 voters as of 1 p.m. as poll workers passed the time by knitting, having lunch, and chatting about the day.

“If nobody votes, nobody can complain about what’s wrong with the schools,” Howell added on Tuesday.

Maggie Freeman, who ran for a seat on the school board in 2022, said she was the 10th person to vote at Good Neighbor Baptist Church in the South Ward as of 2:20 p.m. Every year, she wonders why voter turnout is low.

Nonprofit groups such as Project Ready, The Gem Project, and the Newark branch of the NAACP held candidate forums to increase voter turnout this year. Each group has stressed the importance of participating in the election by canvassing, sharing information on social media, and hosting voter events. Project Ready also hired a truck with an LED message board to drive around the city and encourage people to vote.

Sol Salazar was driving that truck down Bergen Street on Election Day.

“People took pictures by the truck, but the goal is to get them to the polls,” said Salazar before she drove up to the North Ward.

At a polling site inside Newark School of Global Studies, only one person had voted by 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

Ester Perez, a poll worker for a school in the Central Ward on Tuesday, attended McKinley Elementary School and remembers how hard it was to learn English as a second language when she was a student. Perez remembers her parents and others in the city advocating for more services for bilingual students and hopes today’s parents learn to voice their concerns too.

That starts by “going out to vote,” Perez said.

“I remember way back when I went to school that parents were more involved with education,” Perez said. “It was a big topic for the city back then.”

Irvington also held school board elections Tuesday.

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

Newark 2024 school board election: Meet the candidates

2024-04-11T21:30:08+00:00

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Before this year’s presidential and New Jersey senatorial races, Newark residents will vote in the April school board election on Tuesday.

The city’s 160,000-plus registered voters will head to the polls and see a pool of nine candidates on their ballot vying for three full-term seats and one unopposed incumbent looking to reclaim her seat for a one-year, unexpired term.

Low reading and math test scores, aging facilities, chronic absenteeism, and calls to expand bilingual education services are among the top issues facing the district. In the upcoming year, the board will be tasked with addressing these concerns using its recently approved $1.5 billion budget as federal COVID relief funds are set to expire in September.

How do I vote in the April school board election?

Registered voters can vote in person at their polling place from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on April 16. There are 97 polling locations citywide and they are listed by ward in English and Spanish on the Essex County Board of Elections website.

If you’re a registered voter but don’t want to vote in person or can’t make it, you can vote by mail. Voters were able to apply by mail for a mail-in ballot up until April 9. For those who missed that deadline and still want this option, visit the Essex County Clerk’s Office to apply in person before the cutoff time of 3 p.m. on Monday, the day before the election. The county clerk’s office is located at 495 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Newark.

Be sure to follow the instructions on the ballot to deliver it before polls close on Tuesday to the county elections board, located in the same building as the county clerk. If mailing the ballot, it must be postmarked no later than April 16 and received by the elections board no later than six days after polls close.

The voter registration deadline for this election was March 26. Voters for this election must be at least 18 years old but starting next year, the minimum age to vote in the school board election will be 16 in Newark. To check on voter registration status, visit the state Division of Elections website.

Who’s running?

Nine candidates are running for three three-year terms, including Che’ Colter, Muta El-Amin, Dawn Haynes, Latoya Jackson, Sheila Montague, Debra Salters, Vereliz Santana, Helena Vinhas, and Jimmie White. Kanileah Anderson is running unopposed for a one-year unexpired term.

Anderson and Vinhas were appointed by the board in January to fill seats vacated by former board members.

To better understand each candidate’s views on key issues, Chalkbeat Newark sent all 10 candidates five questions, including two submitted by readers. Nine candidates responded.

Here’s what they said in their own words. Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length. Grammatical errors in candidate responses were not corrected.

Judge to review Global Studies report as part of Newark Teachers Union’s open records lawsuit

2024-01-24T22:25:25+00:00

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Newark Public Schools officials have two weeks to provide a state Superior Court judge with a copy of the report on the cultural dynamics at the Newark School of Global Studies to determine whether it can be released publicly.

The scathing report, which the district has not made public, was commissioned after incidents of racial harassment against Black students and staff at the high school surfaced more than a year ago. The Newark Teachers Union sued the district in November for access to the report after its public-records request was denied.

Judge Mayra Tarantino on Tuesday ordered the district to submit the document by Feb. 6 for the court’s private review. The judge also called for both sides to submit arguments on whether the report should be public record and whether any materials held by Creed Strategies, the consulting firm that compiled the report, are also subject to the Open Public Records Act.

Raymond Baldino, an associate at the Zazzali law firm representing the teachers union said the union requested the court’s private review of the document “rather than accept the district’s claim at face value that the report cannot be made public.”

The next hearing for this case hasn’t been scheduled, Baldino said. The district could appeal the judge’s order, he said, but attorneys have not had any discussions about that or a settlement.

Nancy Deering, the district’s spokesperson, and Craig Novak of the Taylor Law Group, who represents the district on the case, did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday afternoon.

In documents submitted to the court in December, Superintendent Roger León argued that releasing the report would have a “chilling effect” on discussions about racial dialogue and sensitivity practices at Newark School of Global Studies and districtwide.

The new court order comes amid persistent tensions between the community and the district over the lack of solutions and transparency on the issue after incidents of harassment against Black students and staff at the high school first surfaced in late 2022. The issues sparked heavy criticism from the community about the response from school and district leaders, who had known about the problems months before they became public.

The situation resulted in at least half a dozen Black students requesting transfers out of the high school and two Black teachers resigning. The former teachers have also filed legal claims with state and federal offices, alleging they experienced harassment and racial hostility from students and supervisors.

In early 2023, the Newark school board commissioned a report on the cultural, religious, and racial dynamics at Global Studies High School. But later that year, León said the report would not be released publicly despite requests from members and community leaders. The district last fall shared only parts of the report that contained three recommendations for the district.

The union filed a public records request for access to the full report on Sept. 29, 2023, arguing that it has an interest in the release of the report and in knowing of any changes or recommendations to the district’s approach to handling student and staff issues related to “anti-Blackness” or “cultural sensitivity,” ultimately affecting teachers in the district.

The district denied the request, citing a legal exemption that allows some draft documents or advisory documents to be withheld from the public. Other parties, including Chalkbeat Newark, have also requested access to the report.

The recommendations released in the fall called on the district to assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system, foster conversations about racial issues, build school staff capacity to identify cultural gaps, and create an environment that is racially conscious and inclusive.

The recommendations came as the high school’s vice principal, Hoda Abdelwahab, left the district. She was among those called out by community leaders during board meetings and in legal claims filed by former teachers at the high school for handling the issues poorly.

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

Newark school board votes in Thomas Luna to fill vacant board seat

2023-10-31T20:55:26+00:00

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Board of education leaders in New Jersey’s largest school district voted in a new member, weeks after the former president stepped down and a new one took her place.

Thomas Luna won a unanimous vote at a school board meeting Monday to be the new member of the Newark Board of Education following a vacancy left by former president, Asia Norton, who resigned two weeks after the start of the school year. Luna was chosen out of 10 candidates who submitted applications to the board last month.

“I get to wake up every day and teach the future of the city. And to bring that perspective is something that is really important to me, and I think will benefit everyone in terms of working with this team of board members to do the work for our kids and our families,” said Luna, a teacher at KIPP Rise Academy and two-time school board candidate, during a phone call on Tuesday.

Luna will be sworn in during November’s school board meeting and will serve on the board until April, when school board elections for the new year take place.

His selection is the latest reshuffling of board members after Hasani Council was sworn in as president last month when Norton departed for a role with the Superior Court of New Jersey.

The news comes as board members continue to work on hiring their separate attorney, solidify their goals for the year, and push for the release of a long-awaited review of the cultural climate at Newark School of Global Studies in the wake of reported incidents of racial harassment at the school, among other work.

Following Norton’s departure, the Newark board had 65 days to fill the vacant seat, according to New Jersey law. They solicited nominations from the community and received 10 applications, which they accepted until Sept. 29. The current board interviewed the candidates on Monday and later that evening voted to move forward with Luna, based on the information received during those interviews, said board president Council on Tuesday.

Luna, a seventh and eighth grade math and science teacher for more than 10 years in Newark, said his first order of business is making sure he gets his “personal bearings” about the work the board is doing. He said he is grateful and excited to work with the city’s school board and best serve its students.

Thomas Luna ran for a seat on the Newark Board of Education in April 2022 and 2023.

Previously, Luna ran for a school board seat in April 2022 and 2023 but both times lost to the Moving Newark Schools Forward slate, which has had strong backing from powerful state and local politicians. Chalkbeat Newark interviewed Luna for the 2023 school board voter guide where he said, “the most pressing issue facing Newark schools today is achievement.”

“As a board member, I would work with my fellow board members and the superintendent to establish and fully fund intervention strategies and teams within our schools to provide the academic safety nets our kids need,” said Luna in April.

A first-generation college graduate, Luna received a degree in public administration from Texas State University. As an educator, Luna has said he’s mentored many of his students even after they moved on to high school and college.

As a leader and organizer with Newark for Education Equity and Diversity, a nonprofit, he has helped community members and elected officials pass policy on the state and local levels. He has led and developed various community programs and believes in collective change, Luna said.

The board may also have to fill another vacant position as board member A’Dorian Murray-Thomas runs against Khalil Kettles next week in the Nov. 7 general election for a seat on the Essex County Board of Commissioners, which approves the county budget, among other responsibilities. Murray-Thomas is running as a Democrat and Kettles as an Independent to represent District 2, which includes Newark, Irvington, and Maplewood.

Murray-Thomas’s term on the school board expires in 2025, but she would not be able to simultaneously hold elected positions on the school and commissioner boards. If she wins, there would be another vacancy on the board in January.

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

Newark school board votes in Hasani Council as president

2023-09-27T02:46:47+00:00

Board members in New Jersey’s largest school district voted in a new board president to succeed Asia Norton, who stepped down last week.

Hasani Council won a unanimous vote at a meeting Tuesday to be the new leader of the Newark Board of Education, as Norton leaves for a new role with the Superior Court of New Jersey.

“We are here for one purpose, and that is to serve and make sure we keep students at the center of every decision that we make,” Council said on Tuesday after thanking his board colleagues for their support.

Norton’s resignation and Council’s elevation leave a vacant seat on the board, just days before members will meet to plan their goals for the year, which include hiring a board attorney.

The board has 65 days to fill the vacant seat, according to New Jersey law. The board is accepting nominations for the role, and those interested must submit a letter of intent and resume to the Newark Board of Education by 4 p.m. on Sept. 29.

Hasani Council, a board member with longstanding political ties in Newark, will succeed Asia Norton.

Board members Dawn Haynes and Vereliz Santana will remain as vice presidents.

Council, a Newark native and alum of University High School, has longstanding political ties in Newark and currently serves as chief of staff to his father, Patrick Council, who represents the South Ward on the City Council. The younger Council also serves as Democratic district leader in the 36th District of the South Ward.

He formerly worked as a legislative aide to former City Council member John Sharpe James.

“You are the first (Newark Public Schools) student that is assuming this leadership role for our city,” said Superintendent Roger León, a former principal at University High School.

Council joined the board in 2020 after running on the “Moving Newark Schools Forward” slate, a group backed by New Jersey politicians including Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, state Sen. Teresa Ruiz, and members of the Newark City Council.

The eight remaining school board members have been endorsed by the coalition, as has been the case for the past few years.

Board members on Tuesday also expressed their gratitude to Norton, who has served on the board since 2018, when the state returned Newark Public Schools to local control. Norton announced her resignation in a Facebook post Sept. 18. She graduated with a law degree from Rutgers Law School in May.

“It’s not easy being in law school and presiding over a board in the magnitude and the dignity in which she did, and we thank her for her service,” Haynes said Tuesday.

The Newark Board of Education will meet on Thursday, Sept. 28, at Mount Vernon Elementary School for its regular board meeting, and on Saturday, Sept. 30, at the district’s central office for its retreat meeting.

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

Newark school board president resigns two weeks into school year

2023-09-18T23:35:05+00:00

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Newark school board president Asia Norton has resigned from her role on the board, she confirmed to Chalkbeat Newark on Tuesday.

The news comes two weeks after the start of the school year and in the midst of the school board working to hire its own attorney. Her resignation is “effective immediately,” according to her Facebook post.

Norton did not cite a reason for her unexpected resignation but on Tuesday, she told Chalkbeat Newark she “stepped down because I work for the superior court of New Jersey, Essex Vicinage.” She didn’t explain further.

In her Facebook post, Norton wrote: “I am departing from the Board but I am still here tearing down barriers to help our students reach their full potential.”

It is unclear who will fill Norton’s role or take on the duties as board president, which include running school board meetings and addressing questions or uncertainties prior to meetings. Under New Jersey law, the board has 65 days to select Norton’s replacement and post the position publicly. The board must also allow for public comment before an appointment is made.

Currently, board members Dawn Haynes and Vereliz Santana serve as vice presidents.

Norton has been a board member since 2018 and her abrupt departure comes as members continue to deliberate the next steps in their search to hire a board attorney and concerns grow over a “drawn out” hiring process.

During August’s school board business meeting, Norton was at odds with other board members after she suggested bringing in an outside attorney to help them in the search, further delaying the hiring process.

Board members said they would hear from an outside attorney during last week’s special board meeting. But at the meeting, the board went into a two-hour closed session and board members did not disclose what was discussed.

The news also comes after board members raised concerns over the need to secure an attorney before the start of the school year, and the ongoing battle to release a long-awaited review of the cultural climate at Newark School of Global Studies following reported incidents of racial harassment at the school.

“Our children define who they are and control their narratives,” wrote Norton on Facebook. “I have pulled from their strength in tough times because they are the definition of perseverance.”

A third-generation Newark resident and South Ward native, Norton was first elected to the board in 2018 and hails from a family of educators. Before being elected to the board, Norton was a teacher for seven years at North Star Academy, KIPP Life Academy charter school, and Marion P. Thomas charter school. She then transitioned to a role as literacy coach at Elizabeth Public Schools with the Children’s Literacy Initiative, according to her biography on the district’s website.

During her time as a board member, Norton worked on partnerships with the New York Federal Reserve, BridgeYear, and other organizations to expand educational experiences for Newark students. She also advocated for an equity officer position within the district to build programs and support policies that create “an equitable education system for all students,” according to her biography.

She also worked with board and community members to improve the representation of Black and Brown people in the district’s curriculum, her biography read.

Norton received her bachelor’s degree from Simmons College in Boston and a master’s degree in sociology and education from Columbia University Teachers College. She received her law degree from Rutgers Law School in May 2023.

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

Newark Board of Education members choose new president, co-vice presidents

2023-05-15T10:00:00+00:00

Five years after New Jersey’s largest school system returned to local control, newly elected Board of Education members — all part of the “Moving Newark Schools Forward” slate endorsed by state and local politicians — were officially sworn in.

Incumbents Josephine Garcia and Hasani Council were reinstated to their roles and newcomer Allison James-Frison took on her new duties. The board also elected members Asia Norton as new president and Vereliz Santana and Dawn Haynes as co-vice presidents during Thursday’s meeting, where parents, district employees, family members, and community leaders filled the room.

According to Essex County election data posted online, 5,408 people, just over 3% of Newark voters, cast ballots in this year’s school board election.

Voters also passed Newark Public Schools’ $1.3 billion budget, which is earmarked to expand teaching positions and “aggressively” tackle learning loss driven by the pandemic by continuing to support programs such as tutoring, among other items.

“I’m not new to the policies and I’m not new to what education excellence should look like,” said James-Frison, a social worker and nonprofit founder as she addressed the boardroom for the first time.

Newark regained full control of its school system in 2018, ending 25 years of state intervention that seized power from the local community and fundamentally reshaped New Jersey’s largest district. The board is responsible for holding Superintendent Roger León accountable and ensuring the district’s progress after state control.

Newly elected board members will serve a three-year term and must work to address the most pressing issues in Newark schools including, learning loss in the district as well as mental health challenges among young people, chronic absenteeism, and graduation rates. They will also have to address the needs of students with disabilities as autism cases spike across the city and state along with the growing number of English language learners in New Jersey’s largest school district.

“The only way we will continue to make progress and expedite that progress is if we continue to come together and work together,” Norton, the new board president, said Thursday. “Our children are depending on the people in this room.”

Before giving their inaugural speeches, Garcia, Council, and James-Frison took turns calling up family members, friends, and campaign volunteers as they were sworn in by the district’s general counsel, Brenda Liss. They read their oath of office statements noting their requirement to uphold the law and “impartially and justly perform all the duties.”

At the meeting, Council abstained from voting on all three board leadership appointments citing issues with the makeup of the board.

“My abstentions were not against my board colleagues. It was because I believe we should have had a totally reorganized board and the makeup of our leadership needed to look different,” Council added during the meeting.

During the meeting, a member of the public who took issue with Norton’s charter school background as a former teacher at North Star Academy, KIPP NJ, and Marion P. Thomas Charter School, interrupted the meeting as board members read the code of ethics. She paced around the front of the room, shouting as security guards surrounded her and asked her to leave.

Board members also voted to reconfirm seating arrangements so the board’s president could sit next to its two vice presidents. The board’s new leadership includes two Black women and a Latina.

The Newark Board of Education will meet virtually on Saturday, May 20 for its annual retreat board meeting and in person at George Washington Carver Elementary School on Thursday, May 25 for its regular school board meeting.

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

Newark schools chief retracts promise to give teachers two days off, says learning loss too great

2023-05-12T19:10:01+00:00

Newark Superintendent Roger León backpedaled on a promise and rejected the teachers union request to extend the upcoming Memorial Day break by using two extra in-session days that were built into the 2022-23 academic calendar.

School board members, a community member, and Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon pressed the chief of schools at a board meeting Thursday to follow through on his promise to end the year early if no days are used for emergency closings due to inclement weather.

Abeigon and the others suggested an extended break before or after Memorial Day would suffice if it’s too late in the year to move up the last day of school by two days.

But León didn’t budge.

“The answer to extending it would be no,” he said, pointing to concerns about students’ low performance in reading and math standardized tests and a rise in chronic absenteeism.

He also said that state standardized testing will be ongoing through the end of the month, which would make it “humanly not possible at this time” to take days off before or after Memorial Day on May 29.

The math, reading, and science standardized tests are scheduled for May 1 through May 26, the Friday before Memorial Day, according to the state testing schedule. Makeup dates are scheduled for May 30 to June 2.

Even so, numerous school districts statewide have opted to extend the holiday weekend with unused snow days, including West Orange, Bloomfield, and others in Essex County.

Though New Jersey schools are required to be in session for 180 days to receive state aid, many districts tack on additional days in the annual academic calendar to allow for sudden closures due to inclement weather or other emergencies.

When the additional days aren’t used, many districts will extend holiday weekends, spring breaks, or allow for an early end to the school year.

The Newark Public Schools 2022-23 school calendar has 182 days, two days more than the minimum 180 requirement. The Newark Teachers Union contract also stipulates a maximum of 182 instructional days, though there can be less than that total. With very light snow this past winter — the state saw record-low snow totals — the district didn’t use the extra two days for emergency closures.

‘Accountability is important’

State code permits school boards to determine the dates schools are open in their districts.

Abeigon asked the school board members at the meeting to make a motion to amend the current school calendar to include two extra days off.

No board members took him up on his suggestion, but two pressured León to explain why he backtracked on his word.

At Newark’s annual convocation on Aug. 30, just before the start of the school year, León told district employees that as a show of appreciation for their work, he would end the school year on June 21 instead of June 23 if the extra two days are not used.

“You know how I said you were valued. You saw how I said we were appreciating you. And you saw that we’re doing it not only with our word but through actions, right?” León said at the convocation, according to a video recording that the union posted on its YouTube channel. “If in fact we do not have any weather inclement reasons to close schools, we will actually close school at the 180th day — June 21.”

But as the school year went on, grim test results showed students struggling in math and reading and the chronic absenteeism rate going up.

“If, in fact, the realities today were any different, we would be making obviously different recommendations,” León said on Thursday. “That is not the recommendation that we are moving forward right now.”

In an email to union members on Tuesday, León also said that “maximizing instructional time for all of our students must be our highest priority” and that deducting two days from the academic calendar would “detract” from that priority.

Though learning loss is evident, it’s hard to see how it would be exacerbated by an additional two days off, said Allison James-Frison, the newly elected board member who was sworn in at the board meeting Thursday.

“And accountability is important,” James-Frison said. “The superintendent stated that he would do it and I think he should be held accountable to what he stated months ago.”

Board member Crystal Williams said she agreed with James-Frison and suggested giving staff and students half days if two full days off is not feasible.

“You can’t tell someone you’re going to do something for them and then don’t follow through,” said Denise Cole, a longtime resident and education advocate, during the public comment portion of the meeting. “That’s not leadership.”

Abeigon said the district’s decision to not go through with the extra two days off could have other ramifications.

“This doesn’t help the teacher retention problem one bit because it will discourage teachers from coming to the district and, in some cases, it will be the last straw for some of our teachers who feel they can’t work in a district where they can’t trust the superintendent,” Abeigon said.

Union leaders raised the issue with district officials at three separate meetings since March, said Michael Maillaro, the union’s spokesman.

The Newark Teachers Union also has support from the state chapter of its union to push for the two days off.

“As a way to show appreciation for the jobs they did all year, it would certainly mean a lot to them if the district recognized their efforts by keeping their promise and not have them go to school for the two snow days they didn’t use,” said Donna M. Chiera, the president of AFT-NJ, in an email. “Those two days at the end of June will not have a significant or any impact on student achievement.”

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

Newark Teachers Union sues district over requests for convocation video, employee bonus pay

2023-03-24T10:30:00+00:00

The Newark Teachers Union is suing the district in an effort to force officials to produce video of this year’s convocation and information on bonus payments made to faculty and staff or prove that the records do not exist.

The teachers union has been advocating since last fall for Newark’s per diem staff — employees who work as needed for the school district — and say they were left out of a $1,000 “Let’s Go to Work” bonus payment given to full-time staff this school year. The district and union have been at odds on why per diems were excluded.

After union leaders filed a request for bonus pay records, the district provided the documents but blacked out the names and payment amounts to eligible employees. Union leaders hope the lawsuit forces the district to release a full list of bonus payouts, with names and amounts, and a video or PowerPoint presentation of this year’s convocation, or to prove that those records do not exist.

“The NTU is interested in researching how the program operates and why some, but not other faculty received the payments,” read the lawsuit filed last month in Superior Court in Essex County.

In an effort to understand the “design and implementation” of the program, the teachers union filed two requests for information about bonus pay records in December and January before filing the lawsuit against the Newark Board of Education in February.

Superintendent Roger León first announced the “Let’s Go to Work” bonus during the annual convocation held at the end of August last year where he thanked staff for their work and their “commitment to excellence during these most unusual times,” according to a district press release. After realizing that per diem employees would be excluded, union members showed up at the December board meeting to protest the exclusion but board president Dawn Haynes argued that the union did not negotiate the payment for per diem employees.

Union leaders disputed the claim, saying it wasn’t a part of their contract negotiations last spring but rather an incentive from León. In an email to Chalkbeat Newark in December, district spokesperson Nancy Deering said the “Let’s Go To Work” payment was a “retention strategy for full-time employees.”

The union and its employees continue to claim that the district’s per diem staff worked during the pandemic and are deserving of the extra pay.

Mike Maillaro, the union’s director of research and communication, filed the first request after the December board meeting for “video of the district-wide convocation from August 30, 2022” and a list of “any and all recipients of ‘Let’s go to work’ grants or payments for the 2022-23 school year with the titles of Chief of Staff, Assistant Superintendents, Special Assistants, Directors, Supervisors, or equivalent titles,” the lawsuit read.

The district responded by saying they did not have a video of the two-hour August convocation and provided an 88-page document of pages that were “almost entirely” blacked-out, except to show the titles of employees who apparently received the pay, according to the lawsuit.

In January, the union filed a second request for records, this time seeking PowerPoint documents, notes, or transcripts of León’s “Let’s Go to Work” presentation at the convocation. The district denied the request and said the records did not exist, the lawsuit alleges.

The Newark Teachers Union has roughly 2,000 per diem classroom aides and teachers who are members. Newark schools were closed from April 2020 until September 2021, prompting concern about returning to in-person learning among parents, students, and teachers who were at risk of being exposed to the virus during that time. The district was forced to shut down schools again as COVID cases surged in December of that year.

The district and teachers union have a scheduled court hearing on April 13.

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

Ethics complaints filed against four Newark Board of Education members

2023-02-24T22:57:34+00:00

Four members of the Newark Board of Education face ethics complaints currently before the New Jersey School Ethics Commission, according to details shared during the February school board meeting.

On Thursday, the school board approved four resolutions to pay $285 per hour in attorney’s fees and expenses for four unnamed board members at the center of the complaints.

The district did not release the names of the board members or details about the nature of the complaints during the meeting. The ethics commission has not released the ethics complaints.

Under New Jersey law, the commission cannot publicly release information about a complaint until a public meeting is held to determine probable cause or violation, or until the matter is settled, withdrawn, or dismissed.

During the meeting, board member Hasani Council abstained from voting on all four motions. Board president Dawn Haynes and members A’Dorian Murray-Thomas and Crystal Williams each abstained from one of the four motions.

According to Robert’s Rules, an abstention is neither for or against a matter before the body and can be used by board members who legally cannot vote on a matter due to a conflict of interest.

Council, Haynes, Murray-Thomas, and Williams did not respond to calls and emails from Chalkbeat Newark. The district’s acting communications director, Nancy Deering, did not respond to an email inquiry about the complaints.

Two board members will be represented by Souder, Shabazz & Woolridge law group, and the other two by Janelle Edwards-Stewart and Porzio, Bromberg & Newman PC, according to Thursday’s resolutions approved by the board.

Calvin Souder of Souder, Shabazz & Woolridge law group did not say what board members his firm was representing and refused to comment on the matter before ending the call. Janelle Edwards-Stewart and Porzio, Bromberg & Newman PC law firm did not respond to calls or emails from Chalkbeat Newark.

The votes on the legal fees came after members entered into a roughly hour-long executive session. Brenda Liss, the district’s general counsel, introduced each resolution and noted the state code requiring school districts to pay legal fees for board members facing litigation during the course of their terms.

The district did not say who filed the complaints against the board members.

This is the first time school board leaders face ethics complaints during León’s tenure. The news comes nearly a month after school board members came under fire after reports that León’s contract was automatically renewed.

It also comes two months before school board elections. Council’s board term is up this year but he has not said if he will run for reelection. Haynes’ term ends next year and Murray-Thomas and Williams have terms ending in 2025.

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

Newark school board blocks attempt to stop superintendent’s contract renewal

2023-01-27T04:23:05+00:00

A Newark school board member’s attempt to stop Superintendent Roger León’s contract renewal and to allow public input went nowhere Thursday, following continued questions about transparency of the process.

Board member Crystal Williams, who was elected last year, introduced a motion to issue a letter of nonrenewal to León before Jan. 31 “in order to reassess his contract” and “give the public the opportunity to voice their concerns.” But the motion died for lack of a second by any of the other eight members of the Newark Board of Education.

Williams’ motion was the first challenge by a board member since last week’s revelation that León’s contract was quietly renewed in May 2022. Once that renewal takes effect on July 1, 2023, León’s term will extend to June 30, 2028, according to his contract.

“The voice of the community is paramount,” said Williams as she introduced the motion. “Let’s take their concerns seriously and do this the right way; there’s no reason to go around it.”

Dozens of Newark parents, teachers, students, and advocates filled the room during Thursday’s board of education meeting and raised a range of issues affecting public school students. Current and former students at Newark’s School of Global Studies brought up concerns over patterns of racist harassment at the school, high school teachers shared their worries over the lack of bilingual teachers supporting English language learners, and advocates criticized the board’s handling of the superintendent’s contract renewal.

Newark school leaders have been under fire after reports that León’s contract was automatically renewed due to a clause in his previous contract that said board members needed to alert him by May 15, 2022, if his term wasn’t going to be extended the next year.

During the public comment portion of the meeting, Deborah Gregory Smith, president of the Newark chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pointed to the community interest in holding the board accountable after it regained full control of the district from the state.

“Since the return to local control, those of us who fought to have it reinstated have not dropped the ball or stopped being involved,” Smith said. “You have not been listening to the community and as a result have not been transparent or accountable for your decision.”

Others like Newark resident Deanna Harrell said they felt compelled to attend Thursday’s meeting because of the concerns over León’s contract renewal.

“I’m not normally here at these meetings, but hearing about things like that made me want to be here at these meetings and I will be here going forward,” Harrell said.

Following Williams’ motion, board member Flohisha Johnson, who was part of the board that approved León’s initial contract in 2018, defended the contract renewal and process.

“I stand behind my superintendent because you know why? I elected him into this office and we appointed him as a board, as a whole, and we don’t have a problem with him,” said Johnson, who was first elected to the board in 2017.

She also read a state law that does not require boards of education to provide public notice or hearings for new contracts, including contracts that replace expired contracts for tenured and non-tenured employees. According to the law, a public notice and public hearing are required only for renegotiations, extensions, amendments, or other alterations to the terms of existing contracts.

John Paff, a longtime advocate for government transparency and a member of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government, said the state law surrounding superintendent contracts should be amended to ensure the public is aware of contract renewals and decisions.

“This whole problem is nothing but lousy public policy. Nothing like this should be automatically renewed,” Paff said. “The average member of the public is not informed enough and shouldn’t be responsible to be involved enough to pay attention to statutes like this.”

New Jersey state leaders should review the mandates set by law to ensure the public’s protection, he said.

“The Legislature should repeal the statute and change it so that a public hearing provision is included prior to the end of a contract. That’s the only way the public could be protected,” Paff said.

The groundwork for the terms of the automatic renewal was set during a “sparsely attended” public hearing held before a regular school board meeting in 2019, as Chalkbeat Newark reported at the time. After the hearing — which was not advertised online ahead of time —the board extended León’s contract by two extra years and added the renewal clause.

León, a former principal and lifelong Newark resident, did not address the controversy at the meeting or at Saturday’s board retreat. Instead, he addressed questions about his contract during an interview on “Chat Box” that aired on YouTube and NJ PBS on Thursday.

“The fact that people didn’t know is really an important factor and just educating the community and having conversations with them is something that we obviously think is important … and will be doing as we get through the end of the term of this contract and as we begin the next one,” León said when asked about the public scrutiny the district is getting in light of the quiet renewal.

He was hired in 2018 for a three-year contract that extended to June 30, 2021, according to board documents.

“I was part of this board when we gained back local control,” Johnson said during Thursday’s meeting. “I was part of this board when we voted the superintendent in, who I think is doing an awesome job.”

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

NJ isn’t tracking school district compliance with COVID-related law for students with disabilities

2023-01-13T16:33:23+00:00

This story has been updated to include a response from Newark Public Schools.

The New Jersey Department of Education says it is not currently monitoring whether school districts are complying with a state law about services that students with disabilities missed out on during the pandemic, despite claims from advocates that more state supervision is needed.

In early 2022, New Jersey passed a pandemic-related “compensatory education law” that requires school districts to meet with all students who received special education services between March 18, 2020, and Sept. 1, 2021, to determine if they missed services during the pandemic. The law also requires districts to find ways to fill in the gaps for students who did miss out.

But under the law, the state education department is not required to collect data regarding school district compliance, Kathleen Ehling, assistant commissioner for the division of educational services at the department, said in a December letter.

Ehling’s comments came in response to letters from a group of special education advocates and attorneys to the department that urged state leaders for more oversight and intervention, after parents in some districts said they didn’t know their rights under the new law.

The group’s letters detailed how districts asked some parents to sign documents about makeup services without having a discussion about services their children missed during the pandemic. In other situations, districts asked parents to write requests for meetings about the matter. In both cases, districts’ actions violated the state law.

The department will review districts’ compliance during the state’s “collaborative monitoring process,” which is a comprehensive review of federal and state special education programs and regulations later this year, the agency added.

In addition, “A further targeted review will be conducted in 2023 to ensure compliance” with the law, Laura Fredrick, communications director for the state education department, told Chalkbeat Newark in December. Districts not in compliance will have to adopt a corrective action plan, she said.

Under the law, school districts had until Dec. 31 of last year to schedule Individualized Education Program (often known as IEP) meetings, with parents of students with disabilities to discuss academic gaps during the pandemic and makeup services to address learning disruptions.

Even though that deadline for school districts has passed, Elizabeth Athos, a senior educational equity attorney at the Education Law Center, said that “if a district didn’t do anything, obviously that’s not good, but it doesn’t mean the district is off the hook.”

Athos, who’s also a member of the New Jersey Special Education Practitioners advocacy group that spearheaded the letters to the state about the matter, said parents should “still try and get school districts to the table” to discuss makeup services and their children’s academic progress during the pandemic.

If a district did not schedule an IEP meeting or discuss missed services during the pandemic, families can also take matters to the state by filing a complaint or requesting a due process hearing by Sept. 1. However, Athos said that strategy could be daunting for some parents who might have trouble navigating the system.

Special education concerns persist amid COVID

The lack of continuous oversight by the state could aggravate fears about the support for students with disabilities during the pandemic.

In April 2020, a new state rule allowed districts to offer special education services virtually. But around the same time, the state department of education also told school districts that even if they offered virtual services for students with disabilities during the pandemic, makeup services might still be needed when students returned to in-person learning.

Despite the flexibility districts received with respect to students with disabilities, Chalkbeat Newark found that in 2020, some of these students hadn’t received services for more than 10 days, a situation that constitutes a change in a student’s IEP, which in turn requires a meeting.

Newark Public Schools spokesperson Nancy Deering said the district “uses internal staff and external vendors to cover any service that may have been missed and families can contact the CST [child study team] at any time.”

“We continue to hire staff and vendors to provide compensatory services,” Deering added.

Marilyn Mitchell, the district’s director of special education did not respond to Chalkbeat’s requests for comment about Newark’s compliance with the compensatory education law.

Last year, the state issued a corrective action plan for Newark Public Schools after it found that the district failed to meet several of its responsibilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the main federal special education law. The state found that the district missed meetings with parents and students, and discovered flaws in student placements and other problems.

Newark’s problems providing support and services to its students with disabilities predate the pandemic. In 2019, state monitors ordered Newark to implement a corrective action plan after they found the district failed to meet key mandates related to education plans for students with disabilities.

Parents can seek help from the state

In her response last month to the New Jersey Special Education Practitioners, Ehling said the state issued a memo before the Dec. 31 deadline reminding school districts of their obligations for making up special education services.

Makeup services may include additional sessions per week, or services provided beyond the regular school day, such as additional speech therapy sessions or academic instruction.

If a school district denied a student extra support to make up for missed services, or if parents feel more should be done to address the need, they can find help from the state by requesting a due process hearing by Sept. 1, 2023.

Parents who did not get an IEP meeting with their school districts to discuss makeup services can continue to request one with their school districts, or reach out to their county’s special education specialist or the state’s Special Education Ombudsman.

Parents can also request an investigation into their complaint by submitting a form to the state. However, Athos said that parents do not need a lawyer to request help from the state.

“[Parents] can keep pushing, and in theory, the state should assist and make districts do what they’re supposed to do,” Athos added.

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

Newark Public Schools promised $1K bonus for employees but per diem staff say they were left out

2022-12-22T15:30:59+00:00

At the last Newark board of education meeting of the year, dozens of teachers wore green — a symbol, they said, of bonuses from which they had been excluded.

Some of the teachers who attended Tuesday’s meeting are per diem employees — staffers that work as needed for the school district — who say they were left out of a $1,000 “Let’s Go To Work!” payment given to full-time staff. The Newark Teachers Union says the bonus should include per diem staff who have worked during the pandemic and beyond, but district leaders argue that the union did not negotiate the bonus for them.

“From my understanding that was a negotiation that was supposed to happen with your union rep so we will see what is supposed to happen,” said Board President Dawn Haynes during the December board meeting. “It was not negotiated for the per diem.”

Superintendent Roger León announced the $1,000 “Let’s Go To Work!” payment during a convocation held in September for all district employees as he thanked staff for their “dedication, contributions, courage, and commitment to excellence during these most unusual times,” according to a press release the school district issued following the event.

In an email to Chalkbeat Newark on Wednesday, district spokesperson Nancy Deering said the “Let’s Go To Work!” payment was a “retention strategy for full-time employees.”

“All staff who worked during the pandemic were compensated for their services and we remain extremely appreciative of all that they did during the most difficult of times,” Deering added.

Newark shut down schools from April 2020 until September 2021, when the return to in-person learning prompted concern among parents, students, and teachers who were at risk of being exposed to the coronavirus during that time. Shortly after, the district was forced to shut down schools again as COVID-19 cases surged in December of that year.

Arie Fiekowsky started working as a teacher for Newark in September 2020 when schools were still shut down and virtual learning became the new normal. As a new teacher, Fiekowsky upgraded her home internet to the highest speed to avoid interruptions in her connection, she said at the board meeting. Once schools slowly reopened, she went back to teaching in person but got sick with COVID, she added.

“All this to say, as a young person with little savings that $1,000 was very important to me,” Fiekowsky told board members.

The Newark Teachers Union has roughly 2,000 per diem classroom aides and teachers who are members, said Michael Maillaro, the union’s director of research and communication.

During the convocation, León welcomed 600 new teachers, according to the district. But from May to October of this year, 325 employees resigned, compared to the 268 instructional staffers who quit in 2021 during the same months, according to data from the teachers union. The union also counted 83 retirements between May and October of this year, compared to 74 retirements in 2021 during the same period.

In November, another 41 members resigned, according to union data.

Newark Teachers Union president John Abeigon said the bonuses announced at the beginning of the year “were not part of negotiations when the current union contract reopened last spring.”

“These bonuses come from the superintendent, not from us,” Abeigon said. “Why would the union do that to its own members? Our sole way of raising money is through union dues, and the board wants to say we would neglect our very own members?”

Alina McKnight also spoke during Tuesday’s meeting and said her workload “is just the same as a teacher” and her duties are the same as other teachers. McKnight is a per diem bilingual chemistry high school teacher who was hired in 2021.

“If you could go ahead and look at the policy again of what it is to be a per diem teacher, I would love for you to do that because we definitely need the guidance and assistance,” said McKnight during public comments.

A per diem classroom aide at an elementary school in the district who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation told Chalkbeat Newark that “there are a lot of injustices going on here” and she is afraid to speak out for her rights.

“We’re the ones that live here in Newark and we were the ones working on the frontlines when we were in the middle of a pandemic — we never stopped working,” the classroom aide said. “So why are we being ignored?”

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

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

NJ advocates urge state to ensure schools address students with disabilities who missed services during COVID

2022-12-07T22:42:05+00:00

Some New Jersey school districts may be violating state law around services that students with disabilities lost during the pandemic, advocates say.

Parents in some districts are being asked to write requests for meetings related to services their child missed during the pandemic or to sign documents about makeup services without having a discussion about their children’s academic gaps during that time period, the advocates say.

This runs counter to a New Jersey law that says school districts must meet with all students who received special education services between March 19, 2020, and Sept. 1, 2021, to determine if a student missed services during the pandemic and find solutions to provide them.

That’s why the New Jersey Special Education Practitioners, or NJSEP, is urging state education leaders for more oversight and intervention to ensure that school districts comply with COVID-related “compensatory education” for students with disabilities before the end of year deadline. The group is made up of more than 100 attorneys and advocates across New Jersey who represent parents, students with disabilities, and the Education Law Center in special education matters.

“I think some state oversight is important in this situation,” said Lisa Hernandez, a member of NJSEP and counsel at Smith Eibeler in Holmdel, who called for more transparency and clarity to help parents.

Parents of students with disabilities in Newark and across the state have a legal right to meet with school leaders to discuss their students’ missed services during the pandemic and ways to address the gaps in education during that time. Under the New Jersey law passed in March, school districts have until Dec. 31 to schedule Individualized Education Program, or IEP, meetings with parents of students with disabilities to discuss the pandemic-related “compensatory education.”

The special education practitioners group first sent a letter to the state’s DOE in late September to express “serious concerns” about districts that have been slow to comply with the new law. The group’s initial letter also asked the state for “detailed information on enforcement of the law,” including whether the state department of education has collected data on compliance, conducted outreach to graduated students, and provided training on the new law to administrative law judges.

Last month the group sent a second letter to the state to push for more involvement and the need to remind school districts of their legal obligations to hold meetings with parents of students with disabilities to discuss services missed due to pandemic school closures.

In April, the state department of education issued guidance informing school districts of their legal obligations under the law but the state has not taken any other measures to ensure school districts are complying or provided additional information to support school districts as they implement the new law.

The state’s department of education did not respond to Chalkbeat Newark’s questions about the group’s letter or state compensatory education oversight at the time of publishing.

Advocates say they are pushing the state to get more involved because some families are unaware of the law or their legal rights as school districts wrongfully impose additional requirements to make IEP meetings happen and discuss missed education during the pandemic.

“Some parents have no idea what’s going on,” Hernandez added. “There’s just a tremendous lack of information coming to families.”

Some parents have agreed to additional services without understanding their rights for compensatory education, Hernandez said.

“They don’t know why all of sudden they are talking about their child’s progress from a year and a half ago or a year ago. They don’t know that,” said Hernandez, who’s consulted with half a dozen parents of students with disabilities about the pandemic related compensatory education. “The point is to discuss the need or potential need for compensatory education.”

Parents can write a request to the district to meet with school officials about makeup services but ultimately, the obligation to set up those meetings before the end of the year falls on the school district even if a parent hasn’t requested it. If a school district denies a student extra services to make up for missed ones or if parents feel more should be done to address the need, New Jersey families can find help from the state by requesting a due process hearing by Sept. 1, 2023.

“Regardless of the conversations that happen by the end of this year, pursuant to the DOE guidance, families still have another nine months to decide if they want to file for due process and mediation to seek additional compensatory services for their kids for this time period,” Hernandez added.

“So, the discussion is not over.”

Compensatory education may include additional sessions per week or services provided beyond the regular school day. In 2020, the state department of education also told school districts that even if they complied with virtual services during the pandemic, make-up services might still be needed when students returned to in-person learning.

Newark Public Schools switched to remote learning in March 2020 due to school closures caused by the pandemic at which time, special education services were allowed to go virtual under a new state rule that year. Despite school districts’ obligations to students with disabilities during the pandemic, Chalkbeat Newark found that in 2020, some Newark students hadn’t received services for more than 10 days, a situation that constitutes a change in placement requiring an IEP meeting.

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

Newark school district gives itself high grades on state-required self-evaluation

2022-11-16T16:28:20+00:00

Newark Public Schools gave itself high marks in this year’s self-evaluation required by the New Jersey Department of Education to measure performance, state support, and oversight, if any, over local districts.

The district submitted its performance review on Nov. 15 as part of the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum, or NJQSAC, the monitoring and district self-evaluation system used to assess school districts in five areas: instruction and program, fiscal, governance, operations, and personnel. In 2017, Newark’s evaluation was vital in the state’s decision to initiate local control to the district after it made “significant progress” and satisfied regulatory requirements of the monitoring system, according to the district’s 2017 transition plan for local control.

During the October board of education meeting, board members said they ranked themselves high in each area of the self-evaluation. Superintendent Roger León added that the board’s responsibility is to say “we’ve met 100 points,” meaning the highest level of performance the district can reach based on all five components of the monitoring system.

If the state finds that a school district scores lower than 80 points on its overall performance, it may require the district to create an improvement plan, undergo an in-depth evaluation, or in extreme cases, the department of education may intervene.

“Our job is not to say, oh, it shouldn’t really be less than 100 points,” said León during the Oct. 27 board meeting. “That’s the state’s job. That’s the job of people who don’t want the district to demonstrate greatness.”

This year, NPS is tasked with proving student achievement to the state despite the effects of the pandemic and learning loss suffered during remote learning. Preliminary state test scores show Newark students scored low in math, reading, and science, a national trend among students. The district must also prove its curriculums are in compliance with state standards, taxpayer dollars are being used appropriately, and school policies and procedures are in place, among other things.

NPS was under state control from 1995 to 2017 after a state judge decried “failure on a very large scale” within its schools and “nepotism, cronyism, and the like” among its school board. During that time, the school board operated in an advisory capacity while the state appointed a superintendent for the district.

New Jersey restored the board’s authority in February 2018, but kept it under state monitoring until July 2020 following a two-year transition period. The changes were made under former Gov. Chris Christie’s administration and following a 2007 law that calls for state-operated districts to regain control of areas they “consistently received strong scores on the NJQSAC” accountability scale.

School districts must undergo the state’s performance review at least every three years. Each of the five areas used to evaluate districts are weighted and used to determine if a district is providing a “thorough and efficient education,” according to the NJQSAC user manual. As part of the evaluation process, district’s must submit their own performance review, which is evaluated in three phases, according to the manual.

During last month’s Newark board of education meeting, interim board president Asia Norton and other board members stressed the importance of the evaluation in order to keep Newark Public Schools under local control. Each committee leader on the board also reported the documents submitted to supplement their review in each of the five areas being assessed.

Once the district’s self-evaluation is submitted, the Essex County executive superintendent will verify the information and documentation submitted for Newark’s performance review before it goes to the state commissioner of education for final review and a state performance score.

If the county finds that Newark satisfies 80 to 100% of the “weighted” performance scores in each of the five areas reviewed, it will recommend the district for a “high-performing” designation to the state. If not, the county will detail areas of improvement for the district.

“This work is important as we wish to continue to remain under local control,” Norton said. “Thus for the last several months, committee and district staff have been working diligently so all necessary materials are compiled and provided to NJDOE so the district is able to receive the highest possible points.”

León said the self-evaluation process started in August, when the district assembled a committee to begin gathering information for submission. A draft of Newark’s performance review was completed on Oct. 7 and posted online for the public to review and submit questions.

The state self-evaluation system was established in 2005 to ensure accountability in school districts requiring state intervention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former Newark BOE employee sues district for allegedly allowing hostile work environment

2022-08-02T14:25:39+00:00

The Newark school district is facing a lawsuit from a former employee who claims she was harassed, discriminated against, and intimidated by district upper management, including Superintendent Roger León.

The incidents allegedly took place between September 2019 and throughout 2020 before the employee, Kristen Hunter, was fired in June 2020, according to the lawsuit filed in New Jersey Superior Court at the end of June. The suit claims the harassment started after Hunter, a former sourcing analyst for the board of education, asked her then-boss, Sherelle Spriggs, for a half day off to take her disabled child to school.

After Spriggs denied the request citing a “blackout period,” Hunter took her request to León, who granted the time off, according to the lawsuit. Hunter alleges Spriggs retaliated against her for going to León and “sabotaged” her efforts to attend professional development classes, tampered with her time records to lower her paychecks, and ostracized her from other colleagues.

Newark Board of Education spokesperson Nancy Deering said the district does not comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit also names school business administrator Valerie Wilson, affirmative action officer Keith Barton, and assistant superintendent Yolanda Mendez, along with 20 other unidentified defendants. Spriggs, Wilson, Barton, and Mendez did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit also claims Wilson ignored Spriggs’ behavior and dismissed the evidence Hunter presented her with, including proof Spriggs tampered with payroll records and hindered her efforts to attend professional development classes. Hunter also alleges that leading up to her firing, León sent “sexually explicit text messages” about her to the assistant school business administrator, Krystal Whitlock. According to the lawsuit, Whitlock invited Hunter to dinner where she then proceeded to “ask invasive questions about Hunter’s sexual preferences and intimate activities.”

“Hunter was mortified when she saw that Whitlock was texting León what appeared to be details about their conversation,” reads the lawsuit.

Newark Board of Education employees work at the district building on Broad Street in Newark.

Hunter, whose son is disabled, said she continued to experience harassment from León, including being “publicly shamed” during central office staff meetings for being late to work after her child was having issues with school bus transportation despite her staying late to make up the time, the lawsuit said. León also yelled at Hunter on June 25, 2020, after his decision to have employees bring their kids to work prompted Hunter to raise concerns for parents with children who required additional support for their children. Former colleagues have said that León developed a reputation as “a taskmaster, with flashes of a hot temper.”

Newark school district employees can file formal complaints to its office of affirmative action, led by affirmative action officer Barton. Hunter complained about León’s behavior, which was disregarded by Barton, who handled the complaint, the lawsuit alleges. Mendez took over Hunter’s complaint and proceeded to send Hunter a letter that included Leon and in-house counsel Alexander D’Jamoos, according to the lawsuit. Hunter was terminated shortly after on June 29, 2020.

This isn’t the first time the district has been sued over allegations of harassment.

In 2019, former Newark Public Schools students filed multiple lawsuits that claim school administrators sexually abused them decades ago. In 2020, at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into a complaint related to sexual violence in the Newark school district. It is unclear if it is related to the multiple lawsuits filed in 2019 by former students. Additionally, in 2015 the department opened an investigation related to the denial of disability benefits in Newark Public Schools. Details about the investigation were not readily available.

Newark school board candidates talk mental health, learning loss ahead of April 19 election

2022-04-15T13:33:00+00:00

Newark voters will head to the polls April 19 to pick three school board members and decide on the district’s proposed local tax levy for next school year.

Seven candidates are running for the open seats on the nine-member board. Incumbents A’Dorian Murray-Thomas and Daniel Gonzalez are running for reelection with newcomer Crystal D. Williams on a slate supported by political powerhouses, including Mayor Ras Baraka and state Sen. M. Teresa Ruiz, the Senate majority leader. The other candidates are Maggie Freeman, Allison K. James-Frison, Thomas Luna, and Phillip Wilson.

The district’s $1.2 billion spending plan for the 2022-23 school year is largely backed by $1 billion in state aid, an increase of $120 million from this academic year. The spending plan also includes $138.3 million from the local tax levy, the amount raised through Newark property taxes to fund schools. Next year’s tax levy, if approved by voters, would remain the same as the current school year’s levy.

If voters reject the proposed tax levy, the budget is sent to the city council to vote on reductions.

The vote comes as the district receives a historic infusion of federal money. Board members will be making high-stakes decisions about policies to address severe learning loss in the district and a mental health crisis among young people seen throughout the state.

School board members develop district policy and participate with district officials in monthly committee meetings on programs and instruction, personnel and policy, and finance, among other topics. The board also picks the superintendent and holds this official accountable.

Voter turnout at the annual Newark school board race has been low for years, hovering around 3-4% of registered voters. The Essex County Board of Elections posted an updated list of voting sites, which will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday. A sample ballot is also available on the county board website.

Chalkbeat asked each candidate the same seven questions about why voters should consider them for office, the challenges the district faces today, and more. Readers can find the candidates’ answers using the interactive feature below. Responses have been edited lightly for clarity.

‘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.”

‘No evidence’ that NJ takeover of Camden schools improved students’ test scores, report says

2021-05-14T22:07:54+00:00

Standardized test scores for Camden City students have improved in recent years but a study released this week found “no evidence” that state control of the district contributed to the upward trend.

“To justify [state] intervention, there should be clear evidence of performance gains that could not be achieved under local control,” read the report, published Thursday by New Jersey Policy Perspective, a nonpartisan think tank. “That evidence is absent in Camden.”

Former Gov. Chris Christie pursued a state takeover of Camden City School District eight years ago in part to address test scores that were among the lowest in the state.

Camden, a district of about 15,000 students across its public, renaissance and charter schools, was the fourth district ever to be taken over by the state and currently the only one under full state control.

Newark regained local control last summer after 25 years of state intervention and Paterson regained control of its schools in January after 30 years. Jersey City, the first district to be taken over in 1989, is undergoing a transition back to local control.

Since the 2013 takeover, Camden has seen improvements in graduation rates and a reduction in its suspension and drop-out rates, among other breakthroughs, state-appointed Superintendent Katrina McCombs said on Friday.

“I wholeheartedly disagree with the foundational premise of the report,” McCombs said, adding that those achievements were reached because of state support.

Historically, it has taken decades for state-operated districts to return power to the local school board. Under a takeover, the school board becomes an advisory board and a state-appointed superintendent reports directly to the state commissioner of education.

The report’s findings show that test scores began improving in 2007, not only for Camden students but also for comparable school districts including Newark, Paterson, and Jersey City.

“We see a preexisting trend that test scores in Camden started to go into a positive direction and improve at least six years before the takeover happened,” said Michael S. Hayes, an assistant professor at Rutgers–Camden. Hayes, who discussed the findings in a webinar on Thursday, is one of three authors of the report.

“If we look at both Camden City and its comparison groups, they’re all experiencing positive gains in math and reading…which suggests, again, it’s not the state takeover,” Hayes said. “Something’s happening to all low-income school districts.”

One explanation for improved student performance and test scores could be economic recovery and the positive effect that has in a household, Hayes noted.

A 2019 study of student achievement during the Great Recession — between 2007 and 2009 — found that declines in test scores were greater in school districts that served more economically disadvantaged students.

“As the economic recovery is improving household conditions, that may be translating to overall gains in performance for low-income students across the state,” Hayes said.

Students in Camden are predominantly Black and Latino and about 43% of families live below the poverty level, according to the most recent demographic data.

Student test scores are one of the key criteria used to gauge performance and justify state intervention, although previous studies have shown that they’re not useful measures of progress in state-operated districts.

Other measures of success include the graduation rate, which is now at 69% compared to 49% in 2012, and dropout rate, down to 11% from 21% in 2012, according to the district. There have also been 53% fewer suspensions since state intervention began in 2013, according to the district.

Those aspects of the takeover “are indisputably good,” said Julia Sass Rubin, an associate professor at Rutgers University and co-author of the report. But still, she questioned, “these improvements, could they have happened without state takeover?”

McCombs said she believes that state intervention has helped the district with student achievement at a “quicker” rate than it might have without state control.

“When looking at the graduation rate — that is a far cry from where we were prior to state intervention,” she said.

But the positive change in the graduation rate is much more nuanced, said Keith Benson, president of the Camden Education Association. Benson said the district shifted its grading scale after the intervention, which changed the classification of a failing grade from 65 and below to 59 and below.

“If more people are failing because of a certain grading system, then more people are getting retained and more are choosing to drop out,” Benson said. “Simply shifting the grading scale ensured more people pass and a better graduation rate.”

“That had nothing to do with state takeover,” he added. “It had to do with changing the grade scale.”

Even so, Benson said there has been a “net benefit” to a state-operated school district. He said two schools — Veterans Memorial Family School and Rileta Twine Cream Early Childhood Center — were saved from closure because of state intervention.

“Without state takeover, it would have just been a done deal and we wouldn’t have been able to appeal that decision,” Benson said. “We get to have this flicker of hope and that bit of hope matters a lot when it comes to saving a school from closing.”

As Newark schools grapple with coronavirus, board members meet behind closed doors

2020-04-24T22:40:04+00:00

Six weeks after the coronavirus pandemic shuttered Newark school buildings, the district faces urgent challenges around attendance, enrollment, virtual learning, and meal distribution.

But instead of convening a formal meeting this month to publicly discuss those issues, the Newark school board held private sessions with Superintendent Roger León, according to multiple attendees. The closed-door sessions limit transparency and accountability and may violate state rules, advocates and experts said.

The board’s “role is to work with the superintendent and be the liaison between the school district and the community,” said Deborah Smith-Gregory, president of the Newark NAACP. “They need to have a meeting and stop playing.”

Last month, the board voted unanimously to suspend its bylaws and expand León’s authority during the pandemic.

Several board members did host a virtual question-and-answer session with families this week, and León joined a virtual parent meeting earlier this month. And the board had no choice but to cancel a reorganization meeting this month that was supposed to take place after the school board election, which the governor moved to May.

However, the board has not scheduled a new public meeting this month to replace the one that was canceled. Instead, small groups of board members met with León and other district officials on Tuesday in virtual sessions that were not open to the public, attendees said.

Each session lasted about two hours and touched on pressing matters related to the pandemic, according to board members. For instance, León discussed how many staff members have tested positive for the virus, emergency funding the district has received, and the delay in “match letters” that tell families which schools their children will attend this fall, the members said.

Under New Jersey’s Open Public Meetings Act, meetings of the full board must be public, but smaller committees can meet privately to discuss specific matters such as personnel and curriculum. However, the law prohibits school boards or other public entities from convening multiple small-group meetings in order to avoid holding a public meeting of the full board.

The board’s sessions this week, in which three members at a time met with León to discuss general district matters, could potentially run afoul of the public meetings law, said Walter Luers, president of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government.

“What they can’t do is say, ‘Okay, I’m going to have a meeting with the first three [board members], and then discuss the same issues with the second three, and then the third three. That’s called a chain meeting,” he said. “They’re not supposed to do that.”

Board President Josephine Garcia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

District spokeswoman Nancy Deering said the board’s reorganization meeting was rescheduled for May 19 due to the change in the board election date. She added that León has met with many people during the coronavirus crisis.

“The superintendent has held countless meetings with stakeholders during this pandemic and actually since the start of his administration,” she said in an email, “and that includes sitting in committee meetings with members of the board.”

Board member Tave Padilla said the board’s committees did not meet this month, which eliminated the need for a full board meeting to report out on the committees’ work. He added that León’s private briefings were intended to keep board members informed, not shut out the public.

“I don’t think he would do anything to deceive anybody,” Padilla said. “He’s been nothing but transparent.”

However, the lack of an official board meeting this month has left the public waiting for answers to urgent questions about how students are faring during the pandemic. For instance, how many students are logging into virtual classes? How many students still need laptops in order to learn from home? And how are schools providing services virtually to students with special needs?

Unlike many New Jersey districts, Newark has not released the school closure plan that all districts were required to submit to the state, further limiting the public’s understanding of how Newark is responding to the crisis.

“The community has questions, and I think it’s the board’s responsibility to answer those questions,” said board member Reginald Bledsoe.

Bledsoe also noted that the board can only vote on district policy or spending at official meetings, not small-group sessions like those held this week. It’s crucial that the full board meet in order to fulfill its oversight role and share vital information with the public — especially during a health crisis, he added.

“I think there’s a need for an official meeting,” he said. “There needs to be information given on the record.”

As part of the board’s ongoing “parent engagement tour,” four board members hosted a virtual forum Wednesday that members of the public could watch online. León gave brief remarks, and board members answered questions submitted by the public. They shared useful information, including where students can pick up free meals, the date of the board election, and when assignments for the marking period were due. Nearly 300 people tuned in.

Yolanda Johnson, a Newark parent organizer, said that families have been eager for information sessions like the one Wednesday.

“That’s what they want right there,” said Johnson, who runs the group Parents Educating Parents. However, she does not believe the forum can substitute for an official board meeting, where members of the public are allotted speaking time and officials share important information, such as attendance data.

“We should have had a board meeting this month so we can be updated on post-COVID 19,” she said, referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Denise Cole, a Newark education advocate and former school board candidate, agreed. She said monthly board meetings allow the public to provide feedback on policies and get information, which is especially important during a pandemic.

“Right now, the public doesn’t know what’s going on in our schools because of the lack of transparency,” she said, adding, “We still have the right to speak and have our voices heard.”

Newark prepares take-home assignments for students in case of coronavirus closures

2020-03-13T00:43:00+00:00

If the coronavirus forces Newark schools to close, students will have thick homework packets to keep them busy.

The Newark school district has created 15 days of take-home assignments in each subject for every grade level, according to a district memo and a sample packet obtained by Chalkbeat. The district will give students paper copies of the “school closure packets” and will post electronic versions online, the message said.

As the coronavirus spreads across the United States and New Jersey, which now has 29 apparent cases and one death, districts are rushing to prepare for possible long-term school closures. On Thursday evening, officials in Bergen County said they will close all public schools in the county, which collectively enroll nearly 170,000 students. The county has faced the state’s largest outbreak, with 13 people testing positive for the virus.

Across New Jersey, more than 180 districts held staff trainings this week to review plans for the coronavirus, according to the state education department, and every district must submit its plans for how it will educate students at home if the virus forces prolonged school closures.

To date, no one from Newark has tested positive for the virus and no district schools have had to close. But the district is still required to develop contingency plans, which it shared with school employees during a previously scheduled staff training on Wednesday.

The cover of a work packet for students that Newark created in case schools are forced to close.

Teachers received copies of the district-made work packets, which include assignments in math, reading, science, social studies, art, physical education, and world languages. A second-grade packet viewed by Chalkbeat contained 109 pages filled with activities, readings, writing prompts, and assignments for students to complete using their textbooks.

Teachers were told to review the packets and consider whether any changes are needed, including for students with disabilities, according to the district memo. Principals must approve changes or additions that teachers suggest.

“We believe that teachers are best suited to ensure that the instructional plans are aligned with the students’ needs,” said the memo, which school leaders read to staff members during the training.

While some districts say they will offer online lessons if students cannot come to school, virtual learning poses major challenges for many districts, particularly in low-income and rural communities. Many families lack the necessary technology at home, and districts may not have the infrastructure in place to deliver online instruction.

About 20% of Newark households lack smartphones or computers and a third do not have internet access, according to census data. It’s unclear whether the district will provide laptops and internet hotspots to students who need them.

Other districts, including Jersey City, also plan to send home assignment packets in the event of school closures, as do some charter schools, such as People’s Prep, a Newark high school that cancelled classes this week because of coronavirus concerns. In Jersey City, the district has issued Chromebook laptops to more than 70% of students and has more than 2,000 internet hotspots available that students could use if they have to work from home, the superintendent told the Jersey Journal.

Questions remain about Newark’s school-closure plans, including how Newark will meet the state’s requirement that districts continue to provide special-education services to students with disabilities and daily meals to eligible students if schools must close.

A Newark Public Schools spokeswoman has not responded to questions Chalkbeat has sent over the past week about the district’s coronavirus response.

Beyond a letter that Superintendent Roger León sent to families and district employees on March 5, the district has provided little public information about its response to the virus, which prompted New Jersey to declare a state of emergency this week and cancel all large gatherings.

By contrast, other districts have provided regular updates through emails and robocalls. Paterson Public Schools created a special coronavirus webpage complete with video messages from the superintendent and detailed information about the district’s closure plan.

Behind the scenes, Newark has been taking steps to prepare for the virus, according to the district memo. District officials have been in regular contact with the city and state health departments, and Newark’s health director recently gave presentations to school principals and nurses.

A specially trained team is scheduled to conduct “intense cleaning at all schools on a regular basis,” while school custodians will continue wiping down high-touch surfaces such as doorknobs and handrails, the memo said. The district is also using a special device to coat surfaces with a disinfectant.

Signs that the district is gearing up for the virus, even as learning continues, were evident in schools across Newark this week, said John Abeigon, president of the Newark Teachers Union.

“Everywhere I went, I saw cleaning going on, training going on, teaching going on,” said Abeigon, who said he visited 10 schools this week.

“The plan is to be prepared,” he added. “Right now, that’s all we can do.”

Newark will prep school workers on coronavirus, as N.J. declares state of emergency

2020-03-10T01:08:05+00:00

The Newark school district will train employees this week to take precautions related to the new coronavirus, including what to do in the case of mandatory school closures, the city teachers union said Monday amid rising concerns about the virus.

On Monday evening, Gov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency, authorizing the education department and other state agencies to take “appropriate steps” to address the health crisis. The move came after state officials announced Monday that five additional people tested positive for the virus, called COVID-19, bringing the statewide total to 11.

To date, no one from Newark has tested positive for the virus and no city schools have had to close.

The governor’s emergency declaration will not immediately disrupt schools, Murphy said in a video message, adding that the risk of infection for individuals remains low and that he made the declaration out of an abundance of caution.

“For the overwhelming majority of New Jerseyans, this declaration will have no immediate impact on daily life,” he said, adding that residents can continue to move around freely and go to school or work.

Last week, the state education department ordered districts to create contingency plans in the case of coronavirus-related school closures. A few districts said they would dismiss students early this week or cancel a day of classes so they could work on the plans, which are likely to include online classes.

More than 600 cases of the coronavirus and more than 20 deaths have been reported in the U.S., according to counts by news outlets. In areas with outbreaks, some schools have closed in order to slow the spread of the virus, while a growing number of colleges — including Princeton University in New Jersey — are switching from in-person classes to online ones. Children appear less likely to develop severe symptoms of the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, but they can still be infected and spread the virus.

Newark Superintendent Roger León said last week that the district has been following city and state health department recommendations and that schools have taken extra health precautions. The measures include nurses giving students lessons on hand washing, and custodians sanitizing high-touch surfaces such as cafeteria tables, desktops, and doorknobs.

The district will share more information with personnel on Wednesday, when students are out of school and employees are to attend a previously scheduled training unrelated to the coronavirus. Custodians, cafeteria workers, and security guards will be trained on health and safety measures, while teachers and other staffers will discuss procedures for school closures, according to the message sent to Newark Teachers Union members.

Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon, who met with León on Monday, said the district is still developing its coronavirus contingency plan.

Forced school closures would pose a number of challenges that the district must think through, such as how to ensure that students continue to receive free or reduced-priced breakfast and lunch that schools serve each day, Abeigon added. One solution could be to ask local community groups and religious organizations to help deliver the school meals to students’ homes, he said.

“It’s a perfect opportunity for the village to stand up and act like a village,” Abeigon said.

Another consideration is how students would participate in online lessons if they do not have home computers or internet access. Abeigon said the district is reaching out to internet providers to explore options for providing internet access to families who lack it, but that plans have not yet been made.

The union is advising teachers to stay home if they experience any symptoms of an illness, Abeigon said, adding that the district assured him that teachers will not be penalized for medically excused absences. He said it is important for teachers to keep calm, which will also help ease students’ anxiety.

“We’re telling everyone, be calm,” he said. “There’s no cause for panic.”

A district spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions Monday about the district’s planning. The district has not posted any information on its website apart from a coronavirus fact sheet.

More than a third of Newark students attend charter schools, which are also required to come up with plans to educate students at home should schools need to close due to the coronavirus.

KIPP New Jersey is still finalizing its plan, said a spokeswoman for the charter school network, which educates nearly 4,800 students at its 11 Newark schools. In the meantime, the schools are stepping up their cleaning and hand washing routines and distributing disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer to every classroom, said spokeswoman Jessica Shearer, who added that no cases of the virus have been reported in any of the schools. The network also created a webpage with information about the virus.
“In the unlikely event we need to close school, we are preparing contingency plans and will continue to keep families updated,” said Joanna Belcher, KIPP-Newark’s executive director, in a Mar. 6 letter to families.

Other charter school operators have taken similar precautions, including Marion P. Thomas Charter School, which serves about 1,500 students across three Newark schools. Custodians are ramping up their cleaning of high-touch surfaces, the schools are stocking up on hand sanitizer and cleaning wipes, and sick students or staff members are being sent home, according to a Mar. 6 letter to families.

The BRICK Education Network, or BEN, which oversees Marion P. Thomas and another charter school, is still developing its plan to educate students at home in the event of a closure, the letter said.

“We encourage everyone to contemplate plans for what to do if BEN Schools are closed for cleaning and/or quarantine for several days,” the letter said.

Ikisha Grant, whose son is in the third grade at KIPP Seek Academy, said her family would manage if the school had to temporarily close — they have a home computer with internet and an older daughter who could babysit while Grant is at work. For now, Grant said her family is focusing on things they can control, like good hygiene, while they await updates from the school.

“I’m trying to calm myself down, I’m making sure we clean up and wash our hands,” she said. “It’s just a lot.”

This article answers questions raised by our readers. Share your coronavirus-related questions, concerns, and ideas here, and keep up with our reporting on COVID-19 here.

Newark schools say they are taking coronavirus precautions, as state tells districts to plan for teaching students at home

2020-03-06T03:39:40+00:00

The Newark school district on Thursday afternoon assured families that it is taking precautions to keep students and employees safe amid the nationwide spread of the new coronavirus, just as state officials announced that a second person had tested positive for the virus in New Jersey.

That evening, the state sent a memo ordering every school board to come up with plans to educate students at home should schools need to close for health reasons, such as a coronavirus outbreak. Home instruction can include online classes and will count toward the requirement that students receive 180 school days per year, the memo said.

New Jersey’s first two “presumptive positive” cases of the virus, COVID-19, were discovered this week in Bergen County, just north of Newark, state officials said Thursday, adding that they are waiting for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to confirm the test results. More cases are likely as additional people are tested, though officials added that the overall risk of contracting the virus remains low.

The letter distributed to Newark Public Schools students and employees on Thursday.

In a letter distributed to students and emailed to employees Thursday afternoon, Newark schools chief Roger León said there is no indication of “the presence of the coronavirus in our schools at this time.” The district is nonetheless taking “precautionary actions” to ensure the health and safety of students and staff members, the superintendent said.

District officials have been in contact with the city and state health departments and are following their recommendations, León said. Inside schools, he added, nurses have been reminding students about safety measures they can take, such as washing their hands and properly covering their coughs, and custodians have been sanitizing “high contact surfaces,” which includes cafeteria tables, desktops, and doorknobs.

“If we learn of further developments that directly impact us in Newark, I will reach out to you again,” León said in the letter addressed to the “Newark School Community.”

The letter did not raise the possibility of school closures in the event of a local outbreak of the coronavirus, which causes flu-like symptoms and has infected more than 200 people in 18 states. It also did not say whether classes will be offered online if students cannot come to school.

The state health department has previously advised schools to prepare for the possibility of a local outbreak that could force schools to close. The potential for school closures has raised questions about whether schools would still be forced to meet the 180-school-day requirement.

Schools can meet that requirement by providing students with home instruction, which can include online learning, each day that schools are forced to close for public health reasons, New Jersey’s Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet said in his memo Thursday to districts and charter schools. The closures must be ordered by state or local health departments, Repollet added.

Every school board must submit its plan for home instruction in the event of health-related school closures to the county superintendent, the memo says. The plans should address how students with disabilities will continue to receive their required services and how eligible students will get meals that are normally served in schools.

Whether schools will be able to provide online classes to students on a large scale remains an open question. Even if schools have the necessary technology, many families do not, said Marie Blistan, the president of the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

“Not everybody has the internet, not everybody has a computer at home,” Blistan told Chalkbeat on Thursday before the state released its memo. “Those are things we have to think about.”

As fears about the coronavirus escalated last month, some districts began posting public notices explaining the steps they were taking to prepare for any outbreak. Newark officials did not provide such information until Thursday’s letter, which was not available online as of late Thursday.

Lisa Santos, whose son is in third grade at Chancellor Avenue School, said she had been waiting anxiously for information from the district about its plans to keep students safe.

“I haven’t heard anything,” she said Thursday afternoon as she picked up her son from school. “Everybody’s pretty much in the dark.”

NJ officials: Schools should prep for possible coronavirus outbreak, including plans for closures and online learning

2020-03-03T01:57:44+00:00

New Jersey schools should plan for a possible coronavirus outbreak in their communities, the state said Monday, even as officials insisted that the risk of infection remains low.

New Jersey has had no confirmed cases of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus that has led to six U.S. deaths as of Monday. State officials sought to ease mounting anxieties about the virus, which has now been linked to 100 cases in the U.S. and has infected more than 90,000 people worldwide.

Globally, few children have come down with the illness and their cases have tended to be mild, officials said. But the virus is likely to continue spreading, which means schools should have plans ready in case of a local outbreak, according to the state health department’s updated guidance.

Ahead of a possible outbreak, schools should establish procedures to quickly send home sick students, provide staff training on preventative measures, and remind students about respiratory hygiene, such as handwashing and how to cover coughs, according to the state’s recommendations. Schools should also prepare to close, cancel events, and provide home instruction in the case of an outbreak, though there is no present cause to close schools, the guidance document says.

“Schools and businesses should be preparing for ill students and staff,” said Lisa McHugh, who oversees infectious diseases at the state health department, at a press conference Monday with Gov. Phil Murphy and the state’s education and health commissioners. Another official added that districts and colleges should come up with plans to limit mass gatherings and provide online classes, if necessary.

It was unclear Monday whether Newark, the state’s largest school district, has a plan. Last week, the district posted a virus factsheet on its website but did not provide any information about precautions taken by the district or individual schools, unlike other districts that have posted information about their prevention efforts. A Newark Public Schools spokeswoman did not respond to multiple emails last week and Monday inquiring about the district’s outbreak preparation.

Meanwhile, the city health department has shared its coronavirus response plan with Newark’s schools chief “as a guide for responding to an outbreak in the Newark Public Schools,” said Dr. Mark Wade, director of the city Department of Health & Community Wellness, in a statement provided by City Hall. The city’s plan is based on guidance from federal and state agencies.

Wade has been in contact with Superintendent Roger León and gave him a coronavirus guide to send home with students, the statement said. And Wade will speak with school principals at a meeting later this week hosted by León.

In New Jersey, all eight people who have been tested for the coronavirus have been cleared, officials said Monday, adding that an additional person was due to undergo testing. In early February, Murphy convened a coronavirus task force with leaders from multiple agencies, including the education department, that meets weekly to plan and coordinate response efforts.

The state is creating a special committee that will focus on school emergency preparedness, officials said Monday. And the governor plans to call school superintendents and higher education leaders this week to brief them on outbreak preparations.

“We’ve been at this for weeks and we’re prepared, but we’re staying vigilant,” Murphy said at the press conference, adding that the overall risk of contracting the illness remains low for New Jersey residents.

There are currently no vaccines or medications for COVID-19, whose symptoms include fever, coughing, and shortness of breath.

If any New Jersey students become infected, districts may be responsible for continuing to educate them while they recover.

State rules require districts to provide home instruction to students who can’t attend school for certain reasons, such as a medical condition or a suspension. Certified teachers must lead the lessons, which can be conducted in person or through online programs.

As part of its coronavirus response, the state education department is monitoring districts to make sure schools provide off-site education when needed, officials said Monday.

While that approach may work for individual students who become ill, it’s unclear whether districts are prepared to offer online lessons to a large number of students. Already, the state teachers union has raised concerns about reaching students whose families lack home computers or internet access. Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon said he was not sure Newark was ready to offer online lessons to students if schools have to close because of an outbreak.

“The city has made big strides in terms of providing Wi-Fi connections and things of that nature,” he told Chalkbeat, “but it’s never been tried at that magnitude.”

State Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet did not address those concerns at Monday’s press conference, where he said that schools would continue to educate students remotely in the event of forced closures. But he acknowledged that having to shut down due to an outbreak, rather than a natural disaster, would be a new experience for many schools.

“We normally have that process in place and they have protocols,” Repollet said. “However, this is something different because now the school closure may be of a health concern, rather than Superstorm Sandy.”

Some districts have already begun taking precautions, which they outlined in public notices.

In Montclair, school nurses are giving classroom lessons on how to stop the spread of germs, while any students with high fevers and severe respiratory symptoms will be kept out of school, according to a Feb. 28 letter to the community from the acting superintendent.

In West Orange, schools have identified isolated spots where they can send students with flu-like symptoms until they are taken home, according to a Feb. 27 letter from the superintendent. The district is also making sure that school health offices are stocked with face masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer, the letter says.

On Monday, state officials said the public could help prevent the spread of illnesses such as the flu and potentially the coronavirus by washing their hands, avoiding contact with sick people, and staying home when ill. They also pointed residents to a state website with coronavirus information, and a 24-hour hotline at 1-800-222-1222 where experts can answer questions about the virus.

“We understand that the public is concerned,” said state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli. “But I want to assure you that we are taking all steps available to protect the residents of New Jersey.”

State: Newark is on track to regain full control of its schools in 2020

2019-12-07T00:00:23+00:00

Newark is poised to regain full control of its schools early next year, formally ending a decades-long state takeover, state officials said this week.

The state restored authority to Newark’s elected school board in 2018 under the condition that it meet the requirements of a two-year transition plan. A newly released progress report says the district has so far “fully implemented” those requirements, according to a presentation Wednesday before the state Board of Education. If the district continues on that course, it will exit state monitoring and complete its return to local control in February.

“They are moving exactly as a model school district should be moving,” N.J. Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet said after the board meeting. He also cited the positive feedback from Newark’s “highly skilled professional,” a state monitor overseeing the transition.

“We are very comfortable and confident that if they continue to work with the highly skilled professional,” Repollet added, “they will get to that point where we will gladly hand over the keys for Newark Public Schools.”

The progress report is the second Newark has received and covers six months that ended on July 31, though the results were not released until this week. It tracks whether Newark is carrying out the activities in the transition plan, such as choosing and evaluating a new superintendent, ensuring that school board members attend training sessions, and submitting a balanced budget.

The district received perfect scores on all the measures, according to the report, which was produced by the Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University. The center will issue a final report in January, which the state will consider when deciding whether to finalize Newark’s return to local control.

“We’re extremely excited and are waiting to see those reports about the incredible work that we’ve actually done,” Newark Superintendent Roger León said at a school board meeting last month.

Much of the information in the progress report was supplied by Anzella King-Nelms, a former Newark principal and deputy superintendent chosen by the state to serve as the highly skilled professional. In that role, she has alternated between advisor and monitor — helping Newark adhere to the transition plan while also informing the state of its progress.

King-Nelms also submitted a progress report, which points to several signs that Newark’s transition to local control is proceeding smoothly. For instance, no ethics complaints have been filed against the school board, mandatory teacher evaluations were conducted, and León released a strategic plan for the district, she wrote.

The state seized control of Newark’s schools in 1995, citing dismal test scores and corruption within the school board. The board was placed in an advisory role and lost the power to appoint the district’s superintendent.

After a years-long effort by Newark activists and political leaders to regain local control of the schools, the state restored the board’s authority in February 2018 — but kept it under state monitoring until 2020.

In May 2018, the newly empowered board named León as superintendent, making him Newark’s first locally chosen superintendent in nearly 23 years. At this week’s state board meeting, board member Arcelio Aponte offered praise for León.

“I think he’s an amazing leader,” Aponte said. “I certainly wish him well and continued progress for the district.”

Two other districts — Jersey City and Paterson — are also in the final stages of exiting from state control.

Reporting contributed by John Mooney of NJ Spotlight.

As Newark school district looks 10 years into the future, it’s asking community members for advice

2019-11-19T17:49:28+00:00

Just months after unveiling a one-year plan to begin overhauling the Newark school system, officials are already working on a 10-year plan for the district — and they want the public to weigh in.

In June, the district published a nearly 30-page strategic plan to create a “stronger, wiser, and more efficient” school system. It drew on the ideas of hundreds of stakeholders collected at more than 30 meetings this year.

But that one-year roadmap was intended as a precursor to a more expansive vision: a decade-long district plan slated for release next June. So, with the current plan just getting off the ground, the district is reconvening focus groups to gather input for the next plan, which will stretch from 2020 to 2030.

“Everyone and anyone who is interested in educating children in Newark will definitely want to be part of the authoring of that strategic plan,” Superintendent Roger León said at last month’s school board meeting, adding that the district needs to have “a good pulse on what people believe are the necessary strategies” to improve the school system.

The latest round of brainstorming sessions began last month and will continue through December. Each session is geared toward a different set of stakeholders, including students, parents, partner organizations, and experts in early childhood and special education. The district invited select participants to join each group, but León added that “everyone else is also invited to attend.”

A Newark-based consultancy called Creed Strategies, which oversaw the development of the one-year plan, is hosting the focus groups with help from district officials and external partners.

The student sessions earlier this year and this fall have been co-hosted by Kaleena Berryman, the executive director of the Abbott Leadership Institute, a nonprofit at Rutgers University-Newark that trains students and parents on advocating for school improvements.

Berryman said the one-year plan featured strategies that students had called for, including more career-training opportunities and additional mental-health services in schools.

“The district is definitely listening — you can see the changes happening,” she said. “That’s what’s kept us at the table.”

At a recent session, students were asked to envision themselves in 10 years, then consider what the school system must do to help turn their visions into reality, Berryman said. Students used terms like “transformative,” “well traveled,” and “mentally healthy” to describe their future selves. To that end, they recommended that the district provide internships, study abroad opportunities, robust mental health and wellness services, and “culturally responsive” classroom materials that celebrate students’ diverse backgrounds.

Berryman said she was encouraged to see officials continue to seek feedback from a broad array of stakeholders as they chart a new course for the district.

“When you’re planning to transform a school district, the conversations don’t end, so why would the community engagement?” she said. “Hopefully it will go on for years and years to come.”

As the district works on its 10-year plan, tentatively called “The Next Decade,” the one-year plan known as “Clarity 2020” is in effect this school year. That document includes nearly 170 action items that touch on everything from teacher training to student transportation and building renovations.

Observers will be watching closely for evidence that officials are achieving Clarity 2020’s objectives amid the longer-term planning. León appears mindful of those expectations, writing in the introduction to Clarity 2020 that the district’s “greatest weakness” is failing to enact the “brilliant ideas” that people in the district propose.

León has also faced questions about his decision to create a decade-long strategic plan. Most districts map out goals for three to five years into the future, though a few appear to have made 10-year plans.

“We know that in education during the course of a decade things constantly change,” Newark school board member Reginald Bledsoe told León at last month’s meeting. He asked how León’s plan would be responsive to “the changes in the trends in education during that 10-year period.”

“To forecast 10 years is really a difficult task,” León acknowledged. He said one way the district will address that challenge is by incorporating shorter-term goals and “milestones” into the plan, allowing officials to periodically evaluate their progress and make any necessary course corrections.

Just as important, León said, will be regular check-ins with schools stakeholders such as parents, students, and teachers.

“We know that we are relying on the community to have a say on every aspect of the strategic plan,” León said. “Not only on its creation now, but also as it continues.”

The district calendar lists upcoming focus groups for the 10-year plan. The next session, intended for students, is scheduled for Wednesday.

This article tackles a topic raised during our 2019 Listening Tour. Read more about the Listening Tour here, and see more articles inspired by community input here.

What’s the status of your school’s water? Search lead test results that Newark just released

2019-10-22T22:00:31+00:00

Amid widespread concern about the safety of Newark’s water, school officials made public last week test results showing high lead levels in water sources at 10 district buildings out of 32 tested from August 2018 to June 2019.

The public disclosures follow recent news reports that the district had shut off water sources in several schools this year after finding elevated lead levels but did not post the test results online or notify families. State regulations require districts to publish the results of lead tests within 24 hours of reviewing them, and to inform families and school personnel when lead levels exceed federal thresholds.

“The part that we own is that these results, while they have been occurring, have not been on the web,” Superintendent Roger León said at a school board meeting last week. “The other piece is that any exceedances have not been properly communicated to folks. That stopped today.”

In addition to posting the results online, the district also sent letters to families at schools where elevated lead levels were found, León said.

Exposure to lead can cause serious health problems, including damage to children’s developing brains and nervous systems.

Earlier this month, WNYC/Gothamist and Chalkbeat separately reported on the lead test results, which were obtained through public records requests. The results showed that seven district buildings had one or more water sources with lead levels above 15 parts per billion, which is the federal threshold for taking action. The reports noted that city and district officials insisted the water was safe to drink even as the tests found several school water sources, including drinking fountains, with lead above 15 parts per billion.

The results posted on the district website last week include three additional buildings with elevated lead levels. A district spokesperson did not respond to questions Monday, including why the results provided earlier in response to the public records request appear to have been incomplete.

The buildings with high lead levels in one or more water sources were 13th Avenue, 14th Avenue, Harold Wilson, Ivy Hill, Mount Vernon, Newark Leadership Academy, Park, Peshine Avenue, Ridge Street, and West Side High School.

At three schools — 13th Avenue, 14th Avenue, and Ivy Hill — elevated lead levels were found in water samples taken from one or two drinking fountains. (All the other tested sources at those schools were below the federal lead action level.) The tests were conducted in January at Ivy Hill and in June at the other schools, the results show. In each case, the affected fountains were turned off after the samples were analyzed.

León noted at the board meeting that schools were on summer break when the high lead levels were found in two drinking fountains each at 13th Avenue and 14th Avenue. He did not address whether the affected fountains may have exposed students and staff to high lead levels during the school year.

The water sources with high lead levels at the other seven buildings were not used for drinking, but were located in areas such as kitchens and nurses’ offices. In those cases, filters were installed or signs were posted above sinks saying, “Safe for Handwashing Only.”

Two of those schools — Newark Leadership Academy and Harold Wilson — have been closed for years, but officials plan to reopen both buildings. The district had hoped to relocate a high school to Newark Leadership Academy’s former building at 301 West Kinney this September, but scrapped those plans because renovations were not complete.

León said the district is working to make sure the buildings’ water is clear of lead before reopening them.

“Those two locations we actually want to bring them online,” he told the board. “One definitely during the course of this year.”

Newark has been in the grip of a water crisis for the past year after elevated lead levels were found in some homes, leading the city to distribute water filters and eventually bottled water. Mayor Ras Baraka has defended the city’s response, which includes a long-term plan to replace thousands of lead pipes. But some residents and advocates have accused officials of downplaying the extent of the lead problem.

The district faced similar criticism this month after it was revealed that officials had not disclosed the findings of high lead levels in water sources at a few schools earlier this year. At last week’s board meeting, León accepted responsibility for the delayed disclosures. But he also emphasized that the vast majority of school water sources that have been recently tested show little or no lead.

“The rest of the whole entire district: The filters that we’re using are obviously working,” León said. “We’re extremely excited about that.”

Those filters were installed, and pipes replaced, after high lead levels were found in the water at more than 30 schools in 2016. As León noted, the remediation efforts appear to be working. Of the several hundred district water sources tested since August 2018, fewer than 20 had lead levels above the federal standard for taking action, according to the district’s data.

Whether the rest of schools are also in good shape remains to be seen.

Newark tests some schools for lead each year, which is more often than required by state rules. The most recent tests covered about half of the district’s schools. District officials have not said publicly when the other schools will be tested and their results posted online.

The database below shows the results of school lead tests conducted from August 2018 to June 2019. School water sources in red had lead levels above 15 parts per billion (ppb), the federal action level.

Database: Sam Park/Chalkbeat. Source: Newark Public Schools.

High lead levels found in water at seven Newark schools, spurring calls for greater transparency

2019-10-09T15:35:53+00:00

Elevated levels of lead were found in the water at seven out of 29 Newark schools where tests were conducted since August 2018, according to newly revealed district data.

The district shut off the water sources with high lead levels soon after the samples were analyzed, according to the data, which Chalkbeat obtained through a public records request.

However, the district did not post the test results on its website, as required by state rules.

The rules also mandate that the district inform families and school staffers whenever elevated lead levels are found. However, the district did not send the required written notifications, according to WNYC/Gothamist, which first reported the test results.

The data comes as Newark grapples with an ongoing water crisis that drew national attention this summer when high lead levels were discovered in some homes, forcing the city to temporarily distribute bottled water. City officials have faced criticism in the past for downplaying the lead problem.

Now, some residents are alarmed that district officials are not being fully transparent about the findings of lead in some schools’ water.

“Parents want to know what’s going on with the water so we can know what to do,” said Ronnie Kellam, whose son is a first-grader at McKinley Elementary School, which was not among the 29 recently tested schools.

“They haven’t shared the data with us — all they do is tell us they’re testing the water,” Kellam added, saying it seems district officials are concerned with “protecting themselves and not getting information out to the public.”

Most of the schools tested from August 2018 to June 2019 had no lead in their water samples or concentrations below 15 parts per billion, which is the federal threshold for taking action. But seven schools had at least one water source with lead concentrations above the federal action level, according to the data.

The schools found to have high lead levels were: 13th Avenue, 14th Avenue, Ivy Hill, Mount Vernon, Newark Leadership Academy, Park, and West Side High School.

The contaminated sources included water fountains and sinks used in nurses’ offices and for food preparation. In each case, the district turned off the affected water source or — at West Side — posted a sign saying “hand washing only” above a sink, according to the data.

A district spokeswoman did not respond to emailed questions Tuesday. She also did not respond in August when Chalkbeat asked whether elevated lead levels had been found any schools since 2017.

During a live radio program last month, Superintendent Roger León said “we have information that is clearly indicating that the water sources that our students are being provided is safe for them to drink.” He did not mention that tests conducted after he became superintendent in July 2018 found high lead levels in 10 water sources across the seven schools.

Referring to lead testing, León added that he is “making sure that when we do this, the results are on the web so that everyone can see.” However, the district has not posted the results of any lead tests conducted after 2017.

In an interview with WNYC/Gothamist, the district’s school business administrator said that officials believed they did not have to notify families and staffers about the elevated lead levels because the district was conducting tests more often than is required by state law.

The administrator, Valerie Wilson, added that officials were also concerned about how the public might react if the results were posted online.

“The next piece is now when you have these exceedances, how do you report them responsibly so you don’t create panic for people,” Wilson said.

The district faced its own water crisis in 2016, when nearly half of Newark schools were found to have elevated levels of lead. In response, the district shut off the water at the schools, replaced lead pipes, and installed new water filters.

Soon after, state lawmakers updated regulations to require districts to test for lead every six years and post the results online. In accordance with the rules, Newark school officials notified families and posted the lead results on the district website.

Since then, the district has continued to conduct periodic tests for lead in schools’ water. Most of the recent water samples showed little or no lead, lending credence to officials who say that schools’ water filters are working. Of the nearly 450 water sources tested since August 2018, just 10 had lead levels above the federal standard for taking action.

Yet even as the findings have been mostly reassuring, the district has not posted any lead test results for more than a year. The most recent samplings to be posted online are from tests conducted in 2017 — despite state regulations that say districts must publish the results within 24 hours of viewing them.

Kim Gaddy, who was on the Newark school board from 2016 until this April, said the district did a good job informing the public during the lead crisis three years ago. But, she said, the district has been less forthcoming about water quality since León took charge.

“I don’t know why that process changed when a new superintendent came in,” she said. “I just see that something changed.”

Gaddy said she was not aware of the district notifying families and schools when high lead levels were found in water sources over the past year, as it previously had. She also said her request that the board share the results at its monthly public meetings “fell on deaf ears.”

“It’s always the lack of transparency and communication that cause problems,” Gaddy said. “When you begin to not share information, then parents begin to ask: ‘What are they hiding?’”

On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced new guidelines that will require districts to test for lead more frequently and submit the results to a public statewide database.

In Newark, Mayor Ras Baraka has repeatedly defended the city’s handling of the water crisis, which has included distributing free water filters and creating a plan to replace thousands of lead pipes.

León has touted the district’s system for filtering and monitoring the water in schools. During last month’s live broadcast of “Newark Today” on WBGO, he added that the district had no reason to hide the results of lead tests.

“We don’t have time to be lying about anything,” he said.

With little fanfare, Newark board finalizes contract deals for Newark teachers, Roger León

2019-08-30T17:52:40+00:00

The Newark school board signed off on two contracts with long-term implications this week.

At its meeting Tuesday, the board formally approved a five-year contract with the Newark Teachers Union and a two-year contract extension for Superintendent Roger León.

Neither contract was on the agenda the board had printed before the meeting. The board had discussed extending León’s contract, which now runs until 2023, at a brief and sparsely attended public hearing before its meeting last week. It had not publicly discussed the teachers union contract, which union members ratified this week. The full cost of the contract, which provides raises and other financial benefits to teachers, has also not been disclosed.

The contracts represent a substantial exercise of the board’s recent empowerment from an advisory board when the district was under state control to one with almost complete authority.

“History was made tonight,” board president Josephine Garcia told her fellow board members after the vote. “This board voted and passed the first [teachers union] contract negotiated, ratified, and passed for the first time as 20 years as a functioning board under local control. You guys should be really proud of yourselves.”

All board members who voted signed off on the contracts. (One member, Asia Norton, said she could not vote because she had a conflict, but added that she is happy that León is leading the school system.)

But one member raised questions about the process.

Instead of voting on a package of items that included the superintendent’s contract extension, Reggie Bledsoe, who was not present for the public hearing about León’s contract, suggested holding two votes.

“Personally, out of respect for our superintendent,” he said, “I think we should separate that item to vote on separately so that we know there’s unanimous support to amend the contract for an additional two years.”

Garcia pushed back against that suggestion, saying that León’s contract had undergone substantial board discussion.

“It’s a discussion we had [last] Tuesday evening, we all unanimously showed our support at our business meeting, but we’re voting on it tonight at the actual board meeting,” she said.

But then another board member, A’dorian Murray-Thomas, formally made a motion to separate the contract vote. It passed, unanimously.

Newark parent activists get a warning: Change your ways or you’ll be barred from school board meetings

2019-08-29T15:37:51+00:00

Yolanda Johnson wasn’t surprised when she got the warning letter from the Newark Board of Education on Tuesday. She said she’d been expecting it.

“Well, this isn’t the first time,” she said.

But when the board previously had cautioned the mother of a University High School student to follow its rules or risk being banned from future meetings, the district had been under state control.

Now, a school board elected by Newark residents had its attorney, Brenda Liss, issue the warning letters. The letters told Johnson and Denise Cole, parent advocates who are both frequent attendees at board meetings and ran for school board positions this year, that further instances of “disregard for the rules of decorum” at board meetings could result in the women’s ban “any and all future meetings of the Board of Education.”

The tactic has precedent in other cities, as well as in Newark. It also is likely to fall within the board’s legal rights, according to multiple attorneys with expertise in New Jersey law.

Still, it suggests that the board could be having difficulties brooking criticism at a time when its members, and the superintendent they hired, say they want parents to have a greater say than ever in Newark schools. One of the arguments against state control was that it was anti-democratic and robbed Newark residents of the opportunity to have meaningful input in school policy.

At Newark school board meetings, each member of the public who signs up has three minutes to speak. Johnson and Cole often stay at the microphone longer than the allotted time.

Johnson’s letter cited her behavior at both the June 25 and Aug. 20 board meetings, and Cole’s cited the meeting on Aug. 20. At that meeting, Cole railed against the board’s intent to possibly ban people from board meetings while she was at the microphone and while in the audience, halting the meeting for several minutes.

“Please let people finish,” Cole said at the meeting. “You need to respect people who come up here.”

“We are, Ms. Cole,” board president Josephine Garcia responded.

Exceeding their allotted time could be legitimate grounds for meeting attendees to face discipline, attorneys familiar with the law said.

“The board is allowed to hold a meeting that is not disrupted in any way,” said Ronald Chen, a Rutgers law professor who specializes in First Amendment law. “If there’s a uniform time limit, they can be held to that.”

One issue, said Alexander Shalom, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union-New Jersey, is that taking up additional time could cost other meeting attendees the chance to be heard.

“A public body is allowed to ensure that the public access portion of the meeting is indeed public,” Shalom said. “If their allegation, as it sounds here, is that these folks are interfering with the ability of other members of the public to participate in public comment … it’s certainly possible that they could ban someone at least for a short period of time.”

Chicago began banning disruptive school board meeting attendees in 2013. But the first people issued ban letters under the new policy had all been accused of physical or threatening behavior, not just speaking too long or too strenuously. Similarly, a Vermont father barred from his district’s board meetings was alleged to pose a safety threat. (His ban was ultimately overturned by a federal judge.)

Johnson and Cole attended this week’s board meeting to protest against the board’s letters. The board’s “bullying and intimidation tactics must cease and desist immediately,” they read aloud from a letter they had sent the board. They also noted that New Jersey’s Sunshine Law states that all meetings of public bodies in the state must be open to the public.

“This is not about me taking people’s time,” Cole said in an interview to Chalkbeat. “This is about the board not wanting to take the time to listen to the public’s concern.”

Meeting attendees applauded the two women, but board members did not respond publicly to their protest. Some attendees felt the decision to warn the women sends the message that the board, the first elected by Newark voters since the city’s schools returned to local control after more than 20 years, is uninterested in hearing from some concerned parents.

“I don’t think that the board sees that irony,” said Newark NAACP president Deborah Smith-Gregory, who attended Tuesday’s meeting. “If they did, they would say, we have to do this differently.”

She added: “Banning those two community activists is divisive to our community. That is not what we need as we transition into full local control. We need all hands on deck, whether we agree or not.”

Roger León has been Newark’s superintendent for 1 year. The board is already considering a contract extension.

2019-08-23T22:45:57+00:00

Just one year into Superintendent Roger León’s three-year term, the Newark school board is considering extending his contract for an additional two years.

The board hired León last year to steer the schools back to local control. Now, it could soon ink a deal to keep him in charge of the school system until 2023 — rather than 2021, as his contract currently stipulates.

The revelation came at a sparsely attended public hearing, held half an hour before the board’s regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday. The hearing was not listed in advance on the district calendar on the board’s website, although a district official said the board had complied in other ways with laws requiring that the public be alerted.

Yolanda Johnson, a parent activist, said she arrived early for the regular meeting — where León’s contract was not discussed — and was surprised to see another meeting taking place. She said she supports León’s leadership but thinks the board would be premature to extend his contract.

“I personally love him, and I see his vision,” Johnson said. However, “the community wasn’t there, and the parents weren’t there. It should have been advertised so we could be in the know.”

A person with knowledge of the situation said the board could vote on the contract extension as soon as next week, when it is scheduled to meet at the district central office on Broad Street on Tuesday. (The board is also holding a retreat, which is open to the public, Saturday morning at its central office.)

The source said the contract extension reflects León’s original request when he agreed to shepherd the Newark district through a period of significant change, after decades of tumultuous state control.

A contract extension would amount to a major vote of confidence in León’s leadership, as the superintendent is just getting started on his plan for elevating achievement in the district. He released a one-year plan this summer and promised that a 10-year plan would follow.

Newark Teachers Union president John Abeigon said he supports the board’s move to guarantee León more time in charge of the district’s schools.

“It takes a while. It took the state eight years to completely destroy and bankrupt the district,” Abeigon said. “I would imagine giving the new superintendent, who is actually an educator in contrast to the two predecessors, time to rebuild the system they destroyed.”

So far, León has started to restructure the district bureaucracy, but many of his school changes haven’t gone into effect yet. And little information about how the district fared under his first year has been made publicly available. State test scores and official graduation rates have not been released, and the district has also not yet released information about attendance and enrollment, two of León’s top early priorities.

Plus, parents in the district haven’t gotten a sufficient chance to influence León’s planning, Johnson said.

“Last year, León had the opportunity to undo some things with a big overhaul of principals,” she said. “But parents want to weigh in more.”

León has indicated at multiple board meetings that promising data is on the way, and the board conducted an official evaluation of him earlier this summer. While it did not make the results available, board members have praised León’s leadership at public meetings.

That continued at this week’s meeting about his contract, Johnson said.

While contract extensions more typically happen closer to the end of their term, school boards sometimes do renegotiate superintendents’ employment contracts earlier. This summer, for example, Randolph Township’s school board extended the local superintendent’s employment until 2023, just one year into her contract. (She had been leading the district since 2016.)

León’s extension also comes amid major changes to New Jersey law governing superintendent contracts. This year, the state removed a cap on superintendent salaries.

Also this year, a state appellate court ruled that boards must give the public 30 days’ notice and hold a public hearing before extending superintendents’ contracts. (One board had tried to evade those requirements by arguing that extensions are similar to contracts with new hires, which are not subject to the same rules.)

Newark parent Shanaya Thomas said she thinks it’s too soon to consider extending León’s contract. If anything, she said doesn’t think it should be extended at all — but as a frequent board meeting attendee, she said she’s mostly disappointed she didn’t know about this week’s hearing.

“I feel like they were trying to keep secrets,” she said. “They don’t want our opinion. Give us a chance to say if we want you back in there. That’s our right as parents.”

Newark parents can now enroll their children at neighborhood schools

2019-08-20T13:19:00+00:00

Starting Monday, Newark families can visit any neighborhood school to enroll their children in schools for the fall, according to information posted on the Newark Board of Education’s website.

Newark schools will now serve as “family support centers” capable of enrolling students in district schools and charter schools that participate in the citywide enrollment system, called Newark Enrolls, the district said.

The update comes after Newark Public Schools announced plans to revamp the city’s online enrollment system to make it easier to use. The new system also will allow families to register in schools via their phones.

The online enrollment system has been down for more than a month while the district transitions to the new system — causing frustration among some parents and school employees. During that time, many families have been visiting the downtown Family Support Center to get enrollment assistance.

As schools now take on the role providing enrollment support, the district will close the downtown enrollment center on Sept. 20, according to the district website. At that point, families will need to visit any district school to get help with enrolling in or transferring schools.

Families should bring their children’s birth certificate or passport, a proof of address, and parent ID, according to the district. Schools can provide assistance from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., or by appointment.

As Newark Enrolls outage stretches on, families and schools start to feel the strain

2019-08-14T18:38:43+00:00

The phone calls picked up this summer at Newark’s KIPP charter network, with frustrated people on both ends of the line.

Parents, left in the dark by the sudden disappearance of Newark’s online enrollment management system, wondered whether their children stood a chance of making it into a KIPP school. And school employees who had a long back-to-school to-do list of their own found themselves checking the waitlist again and again.

“It’s challenging for us,” said Pedro Lebre, KIPP Newark’s enrollment manager. “We’re a pretty lean team. We spend a lot of time answering that question.”

In the recent past, parents could have logged into the city’s universal enrollment system, Newark Enrolls, to check their place on charter school waitlists, add themselves to the list, or enroll immediately in schools with open seats. But this summer, the system has been down since the beginning of July — with no indication of when it might come back online.

Considered a desirable option for Newark families, KIPP maintains a lengthy enrollment waitlist, so it’s unlikely that all schools are experiencing the same call volume. Still, KIPP’s experience suggests that the abrupt shutdown of Newark Enrolls — coming at a time when the district is working with a new vendor to redesign the system — is more disruptive than city officials have let on.

“Enrollment is open and ongoing,” Nancy Deering, acting director of communications for Newark Public Schools, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat last week. “Interested families should visit the Family Support Center at 765 Broad Street.”

It took Newark parent Amiris Rodriguez a while to find that office on Thursday morning. She only succeeded after asking several people to point her in the right direction.

“It was confusing, and I didn’t understand,” she said. “I was just wandering around on Broad Street.”

That center is currently the only way for families seeking new or different school placements to apply for them. Slated to be shut permanently in the near future, it’s open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Rodriguez was on vacation and could spend a few hours on Thursday morning trying to get her children transferred to another school. Many parents can’t.

“We hear from a lot of frustrated parents because those are the exact hours that they work,” Lebre said. “We hear a lot from families who do make it over there and are told we don’t have seats and given a lot of misinformation about enrolling. It’s really difficult to troubleshoot.”

In June, the district announced plans to pay a technology firm to replace the city’s online enrollment system, which families can use to apply to any traditional school and participating charter schools. But officials did not mention that the online enrollment tool would be disabled while the district switches systems.

“Why wouldn’t they continue the old system until the new one’s in place?” asked Wilhelmina Holder, a Newark education activist.

Lebre said district officials offered some answers at a meeting with local charter operators on Friday. There, he said, Newark Public Schools Chief of Staff Havier Nazario said “a safety issue” precluded Newark Enrolls from coming back online. According to Lebre, Nazario offered several examples, including that students could be using the online portal to re-enroll in schools from which they had been expelled.

This spring, the district said a delay in sending admissions letters to families was also due to families being able to use the system to enroll in schools inappropriately.

“It’s an excuse,” Lebre said. “When you use the word safety, how do you argue against that?”

Lebre said his understanding after the meeting was that Newark Enrolls would not get turned back on anytime soon. Officials have not said publicly when they expect the new vendor, SchoolMint, to complete the updated system, but enrollment for the following year usually starts at the beginning of December.

Holder added that the district should keep the downtown Family Support Center open on evenings and weekends in order to ease the burden on working parents.

“A lot of people cannot financially take off from their jobs” in order to visit the enrollment center during business hours, Holder said. “You don’t go to work, you don’t get paid.”

León appoints Newark school district veterans to oversee academics, facilities, and student support

2019-07-12T14:05:01+00:00

A year after forcing out officials hired by his predecessor, Newark superintendent Roger León is staffing up again — promoting principals and other district veterans to fill leadership positions he says are crucial to moving the city’s schools forward.

The new top-level administrators are: Mary Ann Reilly, who will head up teaching and learning; Steve Morlino, the incoming executive director of facilities management; and Maria Ortiz, the new executive director of student life. They join Nicole T. Johnson, a principal who was recently promoted to deputy superintendent, and David Scutari, another principal who will now serve as León’s executive assistant.

All currently work in the district or previously have, a reflection of León’s preference for hiring administrators who are intimately familiar with Newark schools. His immediate predecessors, Christopher Cerf and Cami Anderson, were criticized for filling many top positions with consultants and others from outside the district.

León has also abolished some job titles that his predecessors gave their top lieutenants — including chief strategy officer, chief talent officer, and chief academic officer — and restored departments that were eliminated or renamed, such as human resource services, teaching and learning, and student life. In many ways, León is returning the district bureaucracy to how it looked before Anderson and Cerf arrived.

“Part of what we want to do is take advantage of the fact that I not only know this city, but I also know this organization,” León said at a budget presentation in March where he outlined some of his planned changes.

The school board approved León’s personnel decisions at its June meeting, though León and the board did not discuss the new appointments publicly. Typically, the district posts the agendas of board meetings online so the public can see what items were voted on, including staffing changes. Yet the district has still not posted the June agenda more than two weeks after the meeting.

The latest promotions mean that several more schools will be getting new leaders. Johnson was principal of Elliott Street School in Newark’s North Ward, Scutari was principal of Mount Vernon School in the West Ward, and Ortiz was principal of Luis Muñoz Marin School in the North Ward. And at least six other principals are retiring, resigning, or losing their jobs, according to board documents. No replacements have yet been named publicly.

As the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, Reilly will have a full plate. The role involves overseeing teacher recruitment, curriculum and textbooks, teaching strategies, school improvement plans, support for principals, and more, according to a district job posting.

“I don’t want to call it the brains of the operation, but it is the critical component of what occurs in classrooms in front of children,” León said about the teaching and learning department at a May board meeting.

The position was vacant last school year. That left the previous deputy superintendent, Gerald Fitzhugh II, who stepped down last month, to take on many of those duties.

Reilly was Newark’s literacy director from 1997 to 2001, which involved overseeing English and social studies across the district, according to her LinkedIn account. Since then, Reilly, who has a doctorate in English education from Columbia University, has worked as an administrator in other districts, a college professor, and an education consultant.

After the board approved her appointment at its June 25 meeting, Reilly said on Twitter that she was “joining a dynamic team dedicated to securing better outcomes for all learners.”

Ortiz’s role as executive director of student life makes her the district’s “leader and expert” in student support services, according to a job posting. The student support services department, which did not have a leader for most of the past year, will oversee school counselors, social workers, and attendance counselors, León said in May.

Ortiz will also write the student support curriculum, lead the committee that chooses textbooks, design staff trainings and parent workshops, and collaborate with the heads of the special education and bilingual departments, according to the posting.

After arriving in Newark from the Dominican Republic as a child, Ortiz graduated from the former Science High School and went on to become the city’s first Dominican principal, according to her biography on the district website. A resident of Newark, she is earning a doctorate from Seton Hall University to add to her two master’s degrees. “Her commitment to education is led by her passion for culturally relevant pedagogy, special education, social justice, and bilingual education,” her biography says.

León brought on Morlino as a consultant earlier this year to advise the district on managing its facilities and help write a five-year building plan to replace one that expired last month. He previously worked in the district for 15 years overseeing facilities and other departments. Most recently, he oversaw the facilities for Paterson Public Schools before he was fired in May; Paterson officials did not disclose the reason for his termination.

Now, he will have his hands full trying to rehabilitate Newark’s aging school buildings. Many are plagued by crumbling roofs and outdated electrical systems; and despite a court order saying New Jersey must repair or replace Newark’s schools, the state has mostly allowed them to deteriorate.

“The majority of our schools are requiring repairs that go from basics to major health and safety issues that are of great concern,” León told state lawmakers in March.

During his first year in charge, Roger León started reshaping Newark’s schools — and promised bigger changes to come

2019-07-02T18:51:54+00:00

Roger León had a very big year.

Last July, the Newark native became the city’s first Hispanic superintendent and, owing to the end of a prolonged state takeover, the first in over two decades to answer to the Newark school board rather than officials in Trenton. In the year since, León has met with thousands of local stakeholders, ordered audits of every facet of the 36,000-student system, and boldly promised to make the district “second to none.”

“Right now, the honeymoon is good,” said Brian Taylor, a Newark Public Schools parent and advocate. “He’s homegrown, he cares, he believes, and he’s got the trust of the people in the community.”

But honeymoons last only so long. As he passed his one-year mark Monday, León was grappling with fiscal uncertainties that he inherited from previous administrations, an expired teachers contract, and aging school buildings in need of major repairs — just to name a few of the urgent challenges.

Also on Monday, León’s master plan for the district took effect. León has said it will spark a renaissance at the city’s struggling traditional high schools and marshal the resources needed to meet students’ emotional and physical needs, as well as their academic ones. Now that Newarkers have heard León’s lofty promises and his assessments of where his predecessors went wrong, they’ll be looking for him to deliver changes.

“We’ve got to give him time,” Taylor said. But, “this time next year, it’ll be different kinds of questions being asked.”

Meet the new boss

Last August, just over a month after starting as superintendent, León wanted everyone to know that change was going to come to Newark schools — and fast.

He summoned all 6,300 or so district employees to a downtown arena, where he catalogued his credentials from a towering stage. He had been a student in Newark, a teacher, an elementary and high school principal, and an assistant superintendent, he told the crowd. Now, it was time for a “reorganization” of the system he knew so well.

In recent years, he had watched state-appointed superintendents — white outsiders in a majority black and brown city — close schools and lay off employees, even as the city’s charter schools mushroomed. The changes led to real gains in student learning, but the intervention also incited fury among Newarkers who resented the suggestion, as León’s chief of staff put it, “that we needed an army from all over the place to come in and fix us.”

Those days were now over. To roaring applause, León told his audience that he had forced out more than 30 central-office workers connected to his predecessors. His strategy, he said, would be to grow the district, not downsize it. He would give educators all the support they needed to improve student achievement, without relying on specialists with little classroom experience — “chief of strategy, chief of talent, chief of data.” The only chief “in this house,” he said, would be his chief of staff, a former teacher in the schools where León was principal.

With León at the helm, the state’s largest district was back under local control, governed by a man who knows the city and its schools intimately — and has strong ideas about where to take them.

“I’m not the chief,” León said, his face beaming down from the arena’s Jumbotron. “I’m the boss.”

León addressing district employees in August 2018.

Undoubtedly, some of León’s boasting was a form of vindication. The Newark school board had picked him as superintendent years earlier, yet the state installed Christopher Cerf — a former New York City schools official and New Jersey education commissioner — instead. But León’s swagger was also strategic, a way of embodying renewed pride in the city’s schools.

Former Superintendent Cami Anderson, who previously worked alongside Cerf in New York, had portrayed the Newark school system as fundamentally broken and in desperate need of an overhaul — which she attempted with the backing of then-Mayor Cory Booker and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. By contrast, León talks about a district “poised for greatness,” with all the talented students and educators necessary to reach new heights.

“It’s a breath of fresh air,” said Isabel Sousa, an Arts High School teacher, at the August convention.

León began his tenure with an ambitious listening tour, an effort to build consensus for his agenda rather than impose it from above. He sat down with students and college presidents, community activists and union leaders, and held breakfast meet-and-greets with parents. He showcased his fierce pride and protectiveness of Newark, often calling students “babies” and promising to restore the names of schools that had been changed under state control.

“It’s disrespect,” he said at a budget hearing about such tampering with the city’s history, “and we’re not allowing that, in whatever shade.”

But if anyone thought León planned simply to celebrate the system’s strengths, and overlook any deficits, he quickly disabused them of that notion. At the August convention, he called out schools with the lowest test scores by name. In later meetings, he called the student achievement data “ugly” and “atrocious,” and the curriculum used by many schools “horrible.”

Despite the recent academic progress in Newark, León suggested that many of his predecessors’ policies had failed. He mocked Anderson’s “Attend Today, Achieve Tomorrow” attendance campaign. “You can see they don’t attend today, so they don’t achieve tomorrow,” he said in August. Later, he declared that her and Cerf’s efforts to give principals more authority had backfired: “This whole autonomy concept went buckwild,” he said.

His solution has been to impose new mandates meant to create consistency across schools, and to tell everyone — from students and parents to teachers and central-office staff — that he expects to see results. “It’s all about accountability,” he said at an August school board meeting.

In some ways, his no-excuses style is not so different from his recent predecessors. But whereas their message could sound shaming or condescending coming from outsiders, it’s accepted as tough love when delivered by a lifelong Newarker — the son of Cuban immigrants, León still lives in the same neighborhood where he grew up and went to school.

“Roger is known to the district,” said Nitia Preston, who was the parent liaison at Peshine Avenue School before deciding to leave at the end of this school year. She said she appreciated León’s demanding approach, which she said spurred her colleagues to up their game.

“People were basically saying, ‘Get your stuff together,’” Preston said. “Because Roger is not playing.”

Echoes of the past

With a quarter-century of experience working in the district, León started as superintendent with firm convictions about which policies worked — and which didn’t.

Just as the school year was starting, León began to eliminate those he deemed failures. He ended a program that gave struggling schools longer days, forcing the schools to quickly adjust their hours and bus schedules. He discontinued an online math curriculum, leaving some high schools to use years-old textbooks while the district sought replacements. And after personally reviewing hundreds of student transcripts, he mandated changes to the way high school courses are scheduled. For instance, he ordered schools to split up block schedules that offered extra-long periods of English and math, requiring schools to revamp students’ course loads mid-year.

Even when educators agreed that certain policies were flawed, some felt the changes were rushed and imposed with little warning — a disruptive approach that had galled Newarkers when adopted by Anderson.

León “doesn’t seem to think through the human cost of these decisions,” said a high school teacher who left the district in October, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “All of those changes led to me leaving — I had a full-on breakdown.”

León at a school board meeting in November 2018.

At the same time, León moved to restore past practices that his predecessors had abandoned. He began to reboot vocational programs that high schools had in the early 2000s and rehire attendance workers who were laid off six years ago. He revived a reading program the district used when he was principal, and brought back a requirement that students take an entrance exam if they want to attend one of the city’s elite magnet schools.

Many district veterans cheered the moves, believing that past superintendents had discarded the policies before giving them a chance to succeed. But the approach has also left León open to the charge that he is simply resurrecting pet programs without evidence of their success.

“Some people will assume we’ll just do something from the past that didn’t work,” he said during a state hearing in June. In fact, he said, “What we’re doing is taking something that worked. We’re saying, ‘We learned over the years what were some issues,’ and we’re kind of upgrading it.”

But, to the surprise of some observers, León has embraced a more recent policy: school choice. Both Anderson and Cerf had endorsed the growth of Newark’s charter schools, whose enrollment more than tripled over the past decade. Charter critics, who accused the previous superintendents of trying to shrink or even privatize the traditional school district, expected León to take a tougher stance on charters.

Instead, he has praised the work of some charter school networks and sent district employees to be trained by them. More significantly, he convinced the school board to retain an online enrollment system that allows families to apply to charter and traditional schools in one place — despite calls by community activists and some board members to dismantle the system, which they say funnels students into the charter sector.

“There were people warning me that he would be terrible for charter schools — and that has not been the case,” said Kyle Rosenkrans, a former charter school official who heads a new group promoting district-charter cooperation. “He’s been a willing collaborator and an open-minded, pragmatic, enthusiastic partner. In that sense, he defied the expectations that many had of him.”

Long road ahead

For most of the school year, few people were privy to León’s full agenda. ”He articulates his plan from his head,” a former board member said in November.

Last month, he unveiled a district roadmap for all to see. The plan for next school year touches on nearly every aspect of the school system — from teacher training to student support services to school budgets and buildings. The plan “will help us change the course of history,” León wrote in a newsletter to families.

Yet the document provides scant details about the dozens of new initiatives it lists — a point made even by people who support the superintendent’s vision.

“The overall premise is a good one,” said John Abeigon, president of the Newark Teachers Union. “We’re still waiting to see more details on how it’s going to be effectuated.”

León at an event for his “Clarity 2020” plan in January 2019.

The plan also does not include student achievement goals for next year, making it hard to judge if his program is a success even by its own lights. Officials said such goals will be included in a 10-year plan to be released in June 2020.

Some Newark residents do not want to wait that long to know if León’s reforms are working or to see improvements.

Kanileah Anderson commended León for inviting parents like her to offer suggestions for his district plan. Yet her daughter still had a permanent substitute for most of the school year, and the high school Anderson applied to for the fall said it does not offer the special-education services her child needs.

“I was able to talk to them,” Anderson said of officials in León’s administration. “But I still don’t think anything changed.”

León also has other pressing matters to attend to. He must reach a deal with the teachers union to replace the contract that expired last month. And he must find funds to upgrade the district’s aging infrastructure. Last week, the Newark NAACP sent León a letter requesting that school buildings in disrepair receive any urgent upgrades — including to air conditioners, lights, and bathrooms — before classes resume in September.

At a meeting in Trenton last month where León presented his plan, members of the state board of education praised León’s vision and his efforts to improve student attendance, which appear to be bearing fruit. But they also pressed him for details about his plan, called Clarity 2020. “There’s no good way to say this,” one board member said, “I’m confused on Clarity.”

Another member, Ronald Butcher, said he was “very, very encouraged” by León’s presentation, which included a graph of Newark students’ test scores. But he left León with a challenge.

“Come back to us next year,” Butcher said, “and demonstrate that what you did made a difference in that graph.”

Superintendent León unveils long-awaited plan to build ‘stronger, wiser’ school system

2019-06-14T20:29:40+00:00

After nearly one year on the job, Newark’s superintendent unveiled a long-awaited district plan Thursday that hints at new initiatives while leaving most of the details to be filled in later.

The plan, which Superintendent Roger León crafted with the help of a consulting firm, sets forth a broad theory of change for New Jersey’s largest school district. It is designed to guide the district back to full local governance and set the stage for a more-detailed 10-year plan.

The theory posits that the school system must simultaneously address students’ academic and personal needs, which can only happen through increased cooperation among schools and closer partnership with the community and outside organizations. And it says the district must begin supporting future students while they are still in the womb and continue until they finish college or start careers.

The one-year plan offers a rough sketch of how the district will put that theory into action. Mainly, it lays out a long to-do list focused on analyzing current practices and data and developing new programs and policies.

“This strategic plan is designed to set the foundation for everyone and set the ball rolling,” León wrote in an introduction to the plan, titled NPS Clarity 2020. “We will rebuild a stronger, wiser, and more efficient organization.”

The plan does not include goals for student achievement or timelines for the rollout of new initiatives — both of which are featured in the district’s current three-year plan, which expires this month.

León has previously faced calls from board members to share clear goals for the district. And a document governing the district’s release from state control says the superintendent’s plan should be used to hold the district accountable “for achieving measurable goals that will drive student success.” (A district spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

León’s plan references several specific efforts without going into detail. They include hiring more black and Latino male teachers, training current employees to respect students’ cultures and screening new hires for biases, embedding staffers in every school to coordinate support services for students, sending principals to other schools to get ideas and give feedback, and connecting every student with a mentor and internship opportunities.

But many of the strategies mapped out in the plan are broader and call for redesigning every aspect of the school system — from teacher training and evaluation to student transportation, special education, and the district’s management structure. Léon has promised to release a longer-term roadmap for the district a year from now.

“From work defined in NPS Clarity 2020, we will build and launch a ten-year strategic plan that will reform education in Newark beyond the next decade and for generations to come,” he wrote.

León’s blueprint arrives at a pivotal moment for Newark. Last year, the state began the process of ending its decades-long takeover of the district and the newly empowered city school board chose León — a veteran Newark educator — as superintendent. If the district meets the state’s requirements during the current probationary period, the elected board will gain final control over the schools next February.

León, who started in his new role last July, appears to be guiding the district in that direction. A state report, which was completed in March but made public Thursday, found that the district is so far meeting all of the requirements to transition back to full local control. And during a state school board meeting last week, several board members said they were impressed by León’s leadership and the preview he gave of his plan.

“We have a leader who is as good as any superintendent who has ever come before us,” said state board president Arcelio Aponte, adding that he has known León since they were children. “Superintendent León is well-positioned to lead this district forward.”

León’s tenure follows a recent period of upheaval in Newark that began in 2011 under state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson, who was brought in from New York to overhaul the district. With support from U.S. Sen. Cory Booker and national philanthropists including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Anderson closed some schools, revamped the enrollment system, and laid off many district employees. Some of the policies were driven by the explosive growth of the city’s charter schools, which now educate a third of Newark students.

León’s plan takes stock of some of those changes. It says the state’s operation of the district showed that “the absence of knowledgeable and skilled voices” from the local schools and community made it difficult to “solve complex problems.” And it asserts that “unchecked competition” between traditional and charter schools “destabilizes the infrastructure and resources of the District while promoting division and discord in our communities.”

Yet the plan also calls for collaboration between the district and charter and private schools. And León said Thursday his plan is not an indictment of previous change efforts.

“It is not a critique of reform practices — the most aggressive that we’ve had over the last seven years,” León said at a launch event for his plan.

León hosted a celebration Thursday, complete with cake, to mark the release of his plan.

The policies of the past decade sparked bitter protests, while the charter expansion strained the district’s budget. Yet student achievement also greatly improved during that period, as highlighted by a new report published Thursday. The district’s test scores and graduation rate have climbed steadily in recent years, and its enrollment has stabilized after years of contraction while the charter sector expanded.

But challenges remain. More than 11,500 students are enrolled in chronically low-performing district schools, according to the report produced by MarGrady Research and funded by the New Jersey Children’s Foundation. District officials have warned of budget shortfalls if the charter sector reaches the full size approved by the state. And the district is still grappling with legal settlements and federal investigations that began under previous administrations, León has said.

“We applaud Superintendent Leon and his team for unveiling a strategic plan to continue the improvement of the Newark public school system,” said Kyle Rosenkrans, executive director of the New Jersey Children’s Foundation, in a statement. He added that “much work remains until we can guarantee every child in the city access to a great public school.”

León’s plan draws on substantial input from local stakeholders — including 2,000 personal conversations he said he had last year and a series of focus groups and forums this spring with educators, students, parents, and community partners.

The planning process was led by a Newark-based consultancy called Creed Strategies that is headed by Lauren Wells. Wells, a former teacher with a doctorate in urban schooling, previously advised Mayor Ras Baraka and helped spearhead an effort to improve several Central Ward schools and infuse them with extra services for students and their families.

After León presented his plan Thursday at Science Park High School, he hosted a celebratory dinner at the school complete with a cake that said “NPS Clarity 2020” in red icing. One of the attendees, Rev. Louise Scott-Rountree, said it is now up to the community to help bring the plan to life.

“We all have to play our part,” said Scott-Rountree, who directs clergy relations for the mayor’s office. “The superintendent can’t do it alone.”

High-ranking Newark schools official leaves to run Orange Public Schools

2019-06-07T23:18:40+00:00

A top Newark schools official is stepping down, leaving the superintendent to find a new deputy just as he prepares to roll out a long-awaited plan for the district.

Deputy Superintendent Gerald Fitzhugh II is exiting his post after less than a year to become superintendent of Orange Public Schools, a small district adjacent to Newark, according to an announcement by the Orange school board. He starts July 1.

Fitzhugh, who completed his doctoral studies in education leadership at Seton Hall University this year, sits near the top of the Newark superintendent’s leadership team. He manages the assistant superintendents and oversees the office that directs the work inside schools. Most recently, he helped lead the process of selecting new textbooks for all district schools.

“He is really, really good,” said Superintendent Roger León during a board meeting last month.

The news of Fitzhugh’s departure comes days before León is set to unveil his strategic plan for the district on June 13. León’s leadership team will be tasked with bringing his vision to life. Now, León will have to hire a new deputy to help lead that work.

Fitzhugh’s exit also leaves a vacancy at the top of the Office of Teaching and Learning, which guides schools in areas such as math, English, science, and the arts. Fitzhugh has been filling in as the head of that office while León searches for a permanent leader, which he promised to present to the board at its June meeting.

On Thursday, the district posted an opening for the deputy superintendent position on its jobs website. The posting says the new official will help lead efforts related to special education, student enrollment, and teacher evaluation; help create school goals; and supervise the district’s management team.

The Orange school board also announced Fitzhugh’s hiring on Thursday. Fitzhugh, who began his career as a teacher and principal in Newark, was chosen as superintendent after a national search that attracted nearly 50 applicants, the board said in a press release.

“Dr. Fitzhugh joins our school district after 19 years as an accomplished leader in the education sector,” said Orange Board of Education President E. Lydell Carter.

Fitzhugh and a district spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

Big staffing changes coming to Newark schools, as top-to-bottom overhaul begins

2019-05-21T16:02:11+00:00

Major staffing changes are in store for the Newark school system.

As part of a long-planned district overhaul, Superintendent Roger León is cutting the positions held by dozens of vice principals and other administrators, while also bringing back a school management role that his predecessor eliminated. He is also hiring directors to lead more than a dozen central-office departments, including math, social studies, and bilingual education.

At the same time, hundreds of school employees will see their official job titles change, which could spell pay cuts for some workers, their union warned. Those changes are the result of a 2017 ruling by the state’s Civil Service Commission, which found that previous superintendents had placed 485 employees in non-unionized positions without the agency’s approval.

Now that their titles are shifting, some of the employees will have to reapply for their jobs.

“We can migrate them in there, but they still have to apply officially,” León said at a school board meeting Saturday where he detailed the staffing changes. “Since this is a new title, people don’t have a right to it.”

León added that “good staff” would be retained — but warned that some employees might not make the cut.

“I want the people who aren’t good to go — we don’t need people that are going to delay us,” he said. “This school district, we need people who are going to run forward.”

Key to León’s top-to-bottom reorganization of the district is reversing changes made by his two immediate predecessors, Cami Anderson and Christopher Cerf, state-appointed superintendents who sought to streamline the district’s bureaucracy and give school-level leaders more decision-making power. The prior superintendents pursued those ends by undermining local labor unions and recruiting some school and district leaders with limited classroom experience — methods that rankled León, a career educator whom the local school board named superintendent last year.

“If I have a certificate, people working below me must also have certificates,” León said Saturday, referring to teaching certifications. He added: “This whole autonomy concept went buck wild — and it went buck wild in the central office too.”

León’s overhaul will shake up the corps of administrators who help run the district’s more than 60 schools.

He is reducing the number of vice principals and eliminating the position of chief innovation officer in schools, an Anderson creation that critics considered a tactic to install relatively inexperienced educators as school administrators. At the same time, he is restoring the department chairperson position in schools, which Anderson cut, whose job is to oversee teachers of specific subjects like English and math.

Overall, the cuts will remove 66 administrative positions, saving the district more than $7 million, León said. As the district begins layoffs, more than 100 current administrators will be spared because they have earned tenure.

“This is a scary problem because some of those 101 people may not be worthy of being saved, but they’re protected by the law,” León told the board.

In that regard, he said, he agrees with one of the justifications that Anderson and Cerf gave for their controversial staffing policies — that bureaucracy and union rules can sometimes protect incompetence.

“This is Cami’s argument, and I agreed with her,” León said. “It’s not fair that someone who isn’t good stays in a position because they have more years of experience than somebody who is better.”

One chief innovation officer who has worked in Newark schools for nine years told Chalkbeat that the district recently sent her a termination letter that provided no explanation for her removal. In her role, she helped evaluate and coach teachers, plan staff trainings, and organize workshops for parents, among other duties, said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she is considering appealing her dismissal.

“To be discarded this way, it’s humiliating,” she said. “I have lost all respect for this district.”

Some vice principals who are losing their positions will apply for one of the 55 new department chair spots, which could shrink their paychecks by thousands of dollars, one principal said. The principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said León’s downsizing makes sense: Vice principals proliferated under Anderson, yet many held specialized roles that were not much different than department chairs.

“Now some people are going to lose money, but they probably shouldn’t have been vice principals,” the school leader said. “There’s no other way to fix that than demoting them.”

The nearly 500 staffers affected by the title change include school operations managers and community engagement specialists — roles Anderson established that were originally not affiliated with any union. Union leaders, who criticized the move as a ploy to weaken organized labor and circumvent seniority rules, filed grievances with the Civil Service Commission.

The employees eventually joined the Newark Teachers Union, but the district did not make changes required by the commission until now, said Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon. As the district reclassifies and eliminates certain job titles, it will match employees with the new positions based on their years of experience in the system, said Abeigon, whose union negotiated the salaries of the new roles with the district.

“We’re going to monitor each and every decision they make,” he said, referring to district officials. “If we come across a decision that has been reached in violation of civil service or seniority rules, we’ll definitely bring it to the board’s attention.”

In the coming weeks, León also plans to hire several top officials, including a head of teaching and learning and a new safety director.

He also is looking for directors to oversee 15 academic departments. Some of the departments are currently run by special assistants who lack the proper qualifications, León told the board. His new hires, which the board must approve, will be required to hold teaching certifications, he added.

“The director is supposed to be able to teach the content that they’re directing over,” León said. “These people must be my very, very best.”

How can Newark’s superintendent improve the city’s schools? Stakeholders weigh in.

2019-05-03T16:47:49+00:00

Now that the state has ended its decades-long takeover of Newark’s schools, residents have a few thoughts about what should change.

New employees should be screened for biases and trained in cultural sensitivity. Parents should have access to GED programs and language classes. And students should have a say in policy decisions.

Those were just a few of the ideas that parents, students, and community partners presented this week to Roger León, Newark’s first locally chosen superintendent since the elected school board regained control of the district last year.

The recommendations emerged from a series of community meetings and focus groups that the district hosted over the past few months. León said they will inform the master plan he is set to unveil next month — the product of a nearly yearlong process of analyzing the current state of the school system and plotting its future.

While it remains to be seen how many of the suggestions make it into León’s final plan, the outreach was meant to signal a break from the past, when state-appointed officials devised sweeping changes to the schools without always consulting local stakeholders.

“Newark is a city that doesn’t want people to tell them what to do,” León said Wednesday during a four-hour presentation of stakeholders’ recommendations. “We don’t like that.”

As part of his planning process, León also ordered extensive audits of the district’s school buildings, textbooks, and teaching practices. The findings revealed some bright spots — but also urgent needs.

Newark’s school buildings, many of which have been in use for a century or longer, have leaking roofs, peeling paint, and student bathrooms with missing sinks and toilets, the auditors said Wednesday. The district has just one mechanical lift for cleaning the gutters at more than 60 schools, the auditors added.

Another audit focused on students still learning English, who account for about 11 percent of the district’s enrollment. The audit found that those students “grew linguistically” from 2017 to 2018, but that the growth was “insufficient to achieve the district’s goals.” It also revealed “significant and long-term gaps” in support for those students and the programs that serve them.

A third audit, conducted by external consultants, looked at the academics and culture in 30 district schools. (The remaining schools will be visited this fall.) Based partly on surveys of parents, students, and staff, the review concluded that most of the schools do a good job managing student behavior, forming partnerships with the community, and establishing “positive, professional, and collegial” cultures.

But the auditors also determined that many principals do not give teachers enough feedback on their craft, teachers mostly ask students “low-level” questions, and students are often unclear about what they are supposed to take away from lessons. Many schools also struggle to recruit and retain staff, the reviewers found.

A Newark-based consultancy called Creed Strategies led the planning process that resulted in the recommendations. The consultants convened nine advisory groups that focused on such issues as community engagement, student supports, and special education. (Creed has not released the names of the group members, but they included representatives of local philanthropies, businesses, and universities.) The consultants also hosted public feedback sessions in each of the city’s five wards, where community members and school employees reviewed student data and proposed ways to achieve better outcomes.

Among the other recommendations presented on Wednesday: let teachers help revamp the way they are evaluated, create a parent resource center, better integrate students with disabilities into general-education classes, design an app to help the district communicate with families, and improve relationships between students and school safety agents.

“Walking into that building, I need to know that I’m going to be safe,” said Yamin Reddick, a student at Central High School. “And if I don’t know you as I security guard, then what are you there for?”

The district’s previous superintendent, Christopher Cerf, who was appointed by the state, also convened a series of public forums to gather feedback for his three-year plan, which expires this year. His predecessor, Cami Anderson, sparked outrage when she announced a district overhaul developed without public input, which called for the closure of multiple schools.

León said he will incorporate the stakeholders’ ideas into his one-year plan, called Clarity 2020, which he is set to release June 13, and into a subsequent 10-year district roadmap. Before receiving the recommendations, he has already launched a number of initiatives, which some critics have said came with few details or stated goals.

But Linda Carter, a Newark education activist and professor at Essex County College, commended León for seeking input for his forthcoming plans from people with a wide range of backgrounds and opinions. Carter, who was a member of one of the advisory groups, said the process should be a model for districts across the country.

“That was an example of valuing the community,” she said. When it comes to making decisions about their schools, Newarkers “haven’t felt in a very long time that they were valued.”