A Brief Recap: Part 1 of the Truth about the Announced School Closures discussed the history of the Urban Hope Act (UHA) and its calculated negative budgetary impact on Camden’s public-school system (CCSD) by causing both the loss of thousands of students and school closures across the city. Part I delved further into CCSD’s enrollment complications caused by Camden Enrollment and CCSD District Leadership’s refusal to intervene or find mechanisms to circumvent the devastation caused by Camden Enrollment (likely, in part, due to the fact that for years, our superintendent sat on Camden Enrollment’s board). Additionally, the piece covered the ridiculous idea that for “budgetary” reasons, our superintendent desired to close one neighborhood public school, Veterans Memorial Family School, and repurpose the other, RT Cream, into an all PreK facility to save the District money, when actually both moves would likely initiate CCSD losses of hundreds of students and millions of dollars in state funding. Finally, Part I shared that then-Commissioner of Education (NJ) Dr. Lamont Repollet, intervened, and overruled the superintendent on both actions, and instead reiterated his support for keeping Camden’s public schools open and operating. Certainly. many actions took place throughout the Spring of 2019 to today that are impacting what decisions and conversations are being had about CCSD and the future of its public schools, upon which I will elaborate as it is imperative the public knows the truth behind what’s going on.
At the start of 2019, rather than celebrating the fact that two District public schools were saved, which should have been a shared moment of joy and unity between CCSD leadership and the schools’ communities and District educators, the superintendent immediately began lamenting in the press that the District was in fiscal dire straits. Not surprisingly, the superintendent connected how keeping VMFS open and operating was deepening financial complications for the District. (Recall, the CCSD never did an analysis projecting how many CCSD students could lose if VMFS was closed, or how much the District would subsequently lose in per pupil spending. As such, the District also never acknowledged how much money it saved by keeping the school open along with its 350 students. VMFS lost nearly 150 students along with the roughly $21,000 per child following the superintendent’s declaration the school was closing.) Throughout the Fall of 2019, the superintendent continued to proclaim that the District was in a $27M dollar hole, and that the State needed to supply those funds to prevent CCSD from heading toward a fiscal cliff. While such remarks were repeated ad nauseum in the local media and at Board of Education meetings, what the public largely did not know but the superintendent certainly did, was that the State was doing an extensive audit of CCSD spending and contracts in order to assure that any money the State gave, was needed in the first place. The reality was, at the time, the District did not have a clear sense, in dollars, of the financial condition it was actually in, and thus, the Commissioner embedded representatives from the NJDOE to monitor fiscal operations from early Summer 2019 until the end of the 2020 school year. What state fiscal monitors specifically uncovered over the course of the year, I cannot be certain. What is verifiable and provable, however, is that CCSD’s Business Administrator separated from the District, and the Assistant Business Administrator was terminated within months of one another. (Feel free to draw whatever conclusions from that you wish.)
The superintendent’s consistent drumbeat of CCSD’s poor financial outlook and uncertain future because of it gained traction locally. Repeatedly, the superintendent remarked that the State needed to come up with $27M to keep the District running and to stave off massive layoffs and possible school closures at the conclusion of 2020. (To me, it never made much sense why the superintendent continued to say such things knowing the State was conducting an audit to ascertain what CCSD’s financial outlook truly was.) Then, in mid-April 2020, the superintendent reached out to me and stated, essentially: “the State said we’re going to need to close four schools next year in order to save money.” To the superintendent’s credit, she seemed genuinely concerned about this possibility and continued, “The schools they suggested to closed were Yorkship, Wiggins, Sharp, and Cooper’s Poynt. We can’t close those schools…they’re the only public schools in those areas…if we close those schools, where are those kids going to go to school?…we can’t take this kind of action right now, not in the middle of a pandemic…there’s not really the savings people expect when schools are closed. I’m going to keep thinking and keep praying.” Those, by and large, were her words and I could not have agreed more, and I was a believer in our superintendent at that moment. My reply was essentially: “Hold up, let’s figure this thing out. Gimme sometime and I’ll come up with something and we can go over it then present it to the Commissioner as an alternative to that doomsday scenario of closed schools and massive layoffs.”
In a later discussion with the Commissioner and superintendent, he stressed to both of us: That in our planning, it would be prudent to not cast CCSD as a victim, despite all the politics of which he was well aware, but to show a positive path forward despite CCSD’s difficulties. Throughout the week of CCSD’s Spring Break 2020, I went to work on my end, and I believe the superintendent, went to work on her end. Before the end of the next week a twenty-one-page proposal, How CCSD Will Bounce Back in SY2020-21: Assess, Create, Execute, complete with references and citations, was crafted and sent to the Commissioner for review. The plan called for: a pause on any school closures, increasing district enrollment by making our schools more aligned with parents’ daily realities and aspirations for their child’s schools, and attracting, growing, and retaining our students.
Ceasing school closures: In How CCSD Will Bounce Back in SY2020-21 submitted to the superintendent, which was relayed to Commissioner Repollet, we made the case that CCSD did not have to close any schools for the 2020-21 school year if the State gave the District one year until the new Camden High School opened. When the new Camden High opens, that buildings that house Charles Brimm Medical Arts, Big Picture Learning Academy, Camden Pride Alternative, and Camden High at Hatch would be vacant as those students would be reintegrated under the new Camden High school in separate academies. The State would have the building closures it deemed warranted, and no students would be lost or harmed by the transition, if the State allowed us this one-year reprieve. We also showed the distance between the schools proposed for closure and the nearest public school illustrating that likelihood that if those schools were closed, we’d lose students also. (Yorkship, Wiggins, Cooper’s Poynt, and Sharpe, are the only public schools in those neighborhoods, just as the superintendent observed.) Regarding the future of the school buildings left vacant, the superintendent explained to both the Commissioner and I that “we’d need to hold community meetings to see what residents and neighborhoods want those vacant buildings to be…a community center, a senior center.” Additionally, because CCSD’s schools were operating remotely since mid-March due to the COVID19 pandemic, CCSD saved nearly $4.4M, which was unexpected. The District also showed that at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, its salary burden to staff would be roughly $6.1M dollars less due to retirements and resignations. More unexpected savings.
Increasing Enrollment by Aligning CCSD with Parents’ Realities: It was recognized that one of the major perks charter and renaissance schools offer parents, is greater convenience and flexibility in juggling parenting and work life through offering before care and afterschool care for students. This enabled parents to get to work earlier, perhaps take on extra hours at work, and not have to worry about rushing back to their child’s school for a 3:00PM pickup. In fact many non-publics schools offered some form of afterschool programming allowing parents to pick their children up as late as 7:00PM. (CCSD used to offer a broad array of afterschool programming as well, but due to budgeting constraints, such programming have endured cutbacks for years.) For parents struggling to comfortably make ends meet, or working parents without transportation, having a place to drop their child off early and pick them up later means, at the very least, greater flexibility and child supervision, along with the possibility to earning more income for the family by taking on extra hours at work. The comparative academic quality of schools notwithstanding, such convenience for parents provided by Camden’s nonpublic schools proved to be enough for some parents to withdraw their students from CCSD schools and enroll them elsewhere.
Other recommendations included:
- Reassess and Rethink what CCSD believes motivates parental school selection – research proves it’s not what we’ve commonly heard repreated (test scores, proficiency rates, etc.); that’s not to say academics (metrics) don’t matter at all to parents, just not to the extent commonly communicated
- Distance and Transportation ALWAYS Matters in school selection
- CCSD Discretionary Spending should reflect parental school choice desires. Where possible, instead of spending exorbitant amounts of money on academic programs, perhaps CCSD money would be better spent on Before and After Care for the primary grades, and after school/extracurricular programming for secondary grades (This would represent an investment; spending to gain students in order to add to our District budget)
Attracting, Growing, and Retaining CCSD Students: Despite the popular narrative, CCSD still educates the single largest sector of students when compared to charter and renaissance schools. What was needed was a plan to grow and protect our enrollment. Researching this matter, it was clear that CCSD lost a lot of students in the transitional grades from 5th-6th and 8th-9th. Understanding how important personal relationships are between educators and parents, specifically in communities like ours, and recognizing that because there are so many nonpublic school options in the city, the days of building principals relying on a guaranteed class of students was over. The idea was that principals manning higher school levels would begin to engage and form relationships with students and parents of the schooling levels below their station. For instance, high school principals would begin to overtly and explicitly engage with students and their parents in their local middle schools to begin forming important bonds that would result in that student enrolling in, and graduating from, our District high schools. (This is an approach used to retain students in Catholic schools; principals building relationship-bridges with parents and students in the lower grades.)
Further, it was recognized that the evisceration of our CCSD’s extra-curricular programs, creative electives, and Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs left our schools with little to trumpet. While our sports programs are top-notch, most students are not athletes and most parents care more about their child’s schooling experience than they do about a school’s sports program. Recognizing and addressing the voids in our schools’ offerings was central to developing a plan to attract and retain our children.
I was immensely proud of the How CCSD Will Bounce Back in SY2020-21: Assess, Create, Execute plan in that it seemed, if accepted and implemented, CCSD had a roadmap to reverse the harm caused by the UHA and grow our schools. This plan was emailed to the Commissioner, and superintendent and I spoke to the Commissioner on a Friday. He shared that though District had its emergency $20M earmarked for the 2020-21 frozen due to the State’s financial strain caused by the COVID shut down, he expressed support for the plan and affirmed the District was on sound financial footing. He shared that the District would be getting nearly $12M in CARES Act funding, and an increase in Title I funding of up to nearly $15M, those carryover funds to make up for whatever fiscal hole existed. That left the District roughly $5M dollars shy of a balanced budget, but Mayor Frank Moran, as I was told weeks later, signed a taxation certificate raising municipal taxes in that amount to cover the balance. The superintendent called weeks later to share the State accepted CCSD’s proposal and the schools would stay open. I remember vividly the prayers of thanks I engaged in my office upon hearing this news. We’d done it!
Quite consequential to the discussion of the future of Camden schools, in May, Commissioner Repollet resigned from his post at the DOE to become president of Kean University. With Camden having a state-appointed superintendent, the only person with the power to overrule CCSD’s superintendent was Dr. Repollet; and on behalf of protecting public education in Camden, Dr. Repollet showed the willingness to do so. Where once advocates for public education in Camden had a stalwart in support of Camden’s public schools in Trenton, today, that person is gone and has been succeeded by two acting Commissioners who likely know little about the intricacies of this city and public education here to the extent of Dr. Repollet. And most assuredly, neither acting Commissioner knew of the Plan agreed upon by me, the superintendent, and the former Commissioner. While there is little doubt Dr. Repollet will do well at Kean University as he’s shown himself to be an educational visionary and dynamic leader of people, one cannot help but wonder if the recent consideration pertaining to closing District schools by the superintendent is directly connected to Dr. Repollet’s absence. (Ultimately, the decision to close any public school in Camden has to be approved by the Commissioner regardless of what the superintendent suggests.)
Curiously, by the late summer and early Fall of 2020, the superintendent was right back to publicly lamenting the State’s withdraw of $4M in aid to CCSD, despite knowing, as the Commissioner shared, the only school districts that had money withheld were those that had a balanced budget without it, and that the money was taken back “because Camden didn’t need it.” Only now, Commissioner Repollet is gone, and few people really know what’s fact from fiction when the superintendent is speaking.
Today, it must be noted, that the How CCSD Will Bounce Back in SY2020-21: Assess, Create, Execute plan was in place to protect and improve our schools for both students and families, and in the process, grow this District. It is a fact that the District has not enacted a single element of the plan that was agreed upon in Spring of 2020. It is a fact the District is saving millions by our schools operating remotely; even more now, that it did in the Spring comparatively. It also is a fact that closing any operating family school (Yorkship, Wiggins, Cooper’s Poynt, and Sharp) was never to be part of any discussion pertaining to the future of vacant school buildings. It is a fact that the discussions around the future of CCSD’s vacated buildings was to involve only the four schools left vacant following the opening of the new Camden High School. Finally, it is factual that the same schools in discussion for closure now, are the same schools only months ago, the superintendent, vocally adamantly opposed for the same reasons that are just as valid today as they were then. Some familiar questions: Has the District done an analysis of where the students will go if their schools are closed? Has the District done an analysis of how much money it expects to lose if it chooses to close these schools and students opt to attend a closer renaissance or charter school? How much money would it cost the District in transportation if students want to stay in Camden’s public schools and need busing? Why hasn’t the District made steps to enact the Plan it agreed to? Why hasn’t the District taken steps to grow instead of relying on contracting and school closure? Where has such a model been a successful approach in saving a school district? And again, who’s plan is this?
Poor leadership is costly anywhere, and urban public education is no different. Sadly, the universal outcome is that students, schools, educators, and communities suffer far worse consequences for poor leadership than their District leaders do. There’s no doubt CCSD’s superintendent will land on her feet in green pastures no matter how many schools she attempts to, or succeeds in closing. By no means am I alleging that the superintendent is a bad person or is has subversive motives in the execution of her office. Simply, it is easy to follow a deeply-flawed script of urban district austerity and contraction and, with that, acquiescing that the circumstances CCSD faces are fatal. I also know it takes genuine effort and vision to reverse a catastrophic trend set by the superintendent’s predecessors in fighting to survive, thrive, and grow this District. That takes work, commitment, creativity, and follow-through; essentials that despite how intelligent and decent the CCSD’s superintendent may be, she, heretofore, seems disinterested or unwilling to exhibit. The superintendent has a Plan she agreed to that could possibly save this District costing little, if any money at all but has yet to enact it. Now, here we are having discussions about possible Camden public schools closing – again.
Quite shameful it is that the same questions many were asking in 2019 when this superintendent sought to close VMFS and turn RT Cream into an all PreK facility, are the same questions we’re asking as the same superintendent floats the idea of closing Yorkship, Wiggins, Cooper’s Poynt, and Harry C. Sharpe schools a year later. While I’d bet the ranch the superintendent’s current plan of school closures would never have been considered had Dr. Repollet still been the Commissioner, I’m equally certain of is residents’ and educator’s frustration with CCSD leadership that steadfastly exhibits little interest in improving and protecting its public education institutions that mean so much to so many. While there is little doubt that people will fight the superintendent’s plan to close open and operating Family schools, there is no telling the outcome or how acting Commissioner Dr. Angelica Allen-McMillan would rule on the matter. What cannot be refuted is that so much of what the superintendent shares and has shared with the public over the years has been slanted, out of context, or outright misrepresentations of facts. What, perhaps, the superintendent has relied on however, for too long, was that no one who knows what is true, would share. She was wrong.
*Author’s Note: Everything written above can be proven and substantiated with documentation.
** The How CCSD Will Bounce Back in SY2020-21: Assess, Create, Execute Plan is available upon request
