Crimes against the people of Newark and their children
No, this is not Montclair or Mendham
The woman at the heart of this story doesn’t want me to use her name or her picture–or the names and pictures of her children. I can’t blame her for that. I don’t know anyone who wants to tell the world about her troubles, especially personal financial troubles. The story would have more impact if she were willing to provide identifying details and you could see a picture of her and her children, but I understand why she wishes not to do that. The woman, however, is real and I have spoken to her at length. If someone in authority wants to help her, I will tell that person how to reach her.
I will call her Dolores because that means sad. I will call her 8-year-old son David because that is my son’s name. I will call her 4-year-old son Henry because that is my grandson’s name. All children are our children, after all.
Dolores recently moved to Newark from another town in Essex County. She is unemployed. She ran out of benefits and she is broke. Although she and her children moved into the city before the school year began, she was unable to register her children in the school closest to her apartment, Belmont-Runyon.
Newark doesn’t really have neighborhood schools anymore. Rich white people who live in places like Montclair and Glen Ridge and Mendham have decided the residents of Newark must go to the schools they–the rich white people–say they should go to. So Dolores’s two sons could not go to Belmont Runyon, just a short walk away.
It’s almost funny because those rich white people call this system “choice.” No one I know can explain why. If Dolores could choose, she says, she would choose the school a block or so away. But strangers who can’t possibly know how it is to live like Dolores chose to send Dolores’s 8-year-old son, David, to a school more than a mile away. It’s called the Hawthorne School.
To get David to school every morning, Dolores must get up about six when it is still dark and feed and dress her two sons. Then Dolores walks with her two young children to the bus stop and catches the bus that goes partly across town to the Hawthorne Avenue School.
Then Dolores gets back on the bus with Henry to go home. A few hours later, she Crimes against the people of Newark and their children | Bob Braun's Ledger: