Cry for Newark
Sad. There’s a word rarely heard in the context of the state’s war on Newark’s neighborhood public schools. Sad. Yet the story of how a cruelly tone-deaf state bureaucrat named Cami Anderson is singlehandedly destroying a community’s neighborhood schools is just that. Sad. And nothing more illustrates that sadness than the brave but probably futile effort of one successful neighborhood school to remain alive despite Anderson’s promise to give it to privatized educational entrepreneurs who include former business partners of the recently resigned state education commissioner.
“What more do we need to do?” pleaded Grace Sergio, the outgoing president of the Hawthorne Avenue School parent organization. “What more do we need to do?” She was speaking to a –sadly—impotent Newark school board that Anderson, appointed by Gov. Chris Christie, has all but reduced to an irrelevance. Anderson is required to attend the board meetings but has refused. She goes to out-of-state conferences instead.
Sergio’s question is important, not only in the limited context of the state’s efforts to strip Newark of its neighborhood schools—and this in a city with little intra-district busing—but also in the larger context of the war on public education statewide and nationally. As part of what Anderson calls the “One Newark” plan, Hawthorne Avenue will be closed and reopened as a hybrid charter (TEAM Academy, part of KIPP) and so-called “Brick academy,” a quasi-public school run by a school