In Newark, wasting money to sabotage charter schools

State taxpayers send over a billion dollars a year in school aid to Newark, and more and more evidence suggests that the district is wasting large sums of it.

The latest is its costly decision, with the state’s help, to open a new elementary school in an area of the city where the existing elementary schools were already underenrolled.

For some reason, the Murphy administration supported the move, giving Newark the money it needed to win the building over top charter schools that also put in bids. Was the real purpose here to block the development of a charter school? That would fit with Superintendent Roger León’s long record of hostility to the charters, even though children there are performing much better on average than in district schools.

The competition also drove up the price to $15.5 million, after the state initially appraised the building at $8.5 million in 2022. Now, like some of its neighboring elementary schools in the Central ward, the new Nelson Mandela school has relatively few students, with a 7 to 1 student teacher ratio, according to the Newark Enrolls database.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city and in other districts like Elizabeth, students are crammed into badly overcrowded classrooms. From a statewide perspective, what sense does it make to make this purchase the priority?

If León wants to take on charter schools, he doesn’t need to sabotage them. He could instead offer Newark families a better alternative by improving district schools.

“Your best selling point is a good product,” as Newark Councilman Anibal Ramos says. “I think if the district is in a position where it’s offering good educational options for parents, they’re going to choose traditional Newark schools versus charters.”

León’s hostility to charters is an expensive indulgence. Take the case where he went to court in a failed attempt to claw back the sale of a building that was being used by a charter school; one the district had previously sold to a developer for $1.2 million. The city ended up spending more than $2.1 million on lawyers in that pointless fight, and a related case in which it tried to claw back another building it had sold off years ago for $650,000.

And it lost in court, with a judge calling the district’s case against the charter school a “shameful” use of tax dollars.

So why is the Murphy administration collaborating with Newark school officials to further undercut charters and waste more money like this?

An email exchange between the district and Schools Development Authority (SDA), obtained by Tapinto through a public records request, provides a clue. Among the bidders for the building was North Star, a high-performing charter network that had finally been granted 492 new seats by the Murphy administration after a long fight to expand, and over the objection of Newark’s superintendent.

The district’s business administrator, Valerie Wilson, wrote to the state’s school construction chief, Manuel Da Silva, to lament that North Star won approval for so many new seats, calling it “a real nightmare.” Da Silva replied, “Wow that’s a significant increase.” Then his agency proceeded to muscle out North Star and other charter schools for the building, apparently.

Did somebody call up and ask for this favor from the SDA, a notorious patronage pit? We don’t know. The district denies that this was about blocking a charter, and we got no answer of substance from the SDA. But it reeks of politics, rather than good sense.

Newark families rank schools by preference under the city’s universal enrollment system, and it appears they’re not flocking to the Central ward. The superintendent argues that the ten new schools he’s opened – including several in this ward – aren’t underenrolled, just growing gradually by adding one grade per year.

But in fact, many are losing kids in almost all their grade level cohorts, Tapinto reported last year, after reviewing enrollment data that the district submitted to the state for the six new schools for which it was available.

While these schools grew in overall size each year because they were adding a grade, almost every existing grade shrunk as kids left, Tapinto found. Three of the new schools also spent time under state oversight for poor performance. And if Newark schools are in such demand, then why is the district paying a Memphis headhunter nearly $900 for each child it can find to enroll, according to a contract approved by the school board in June?

It’s unclear why León is opening all these new schools at a time when he has excess capacity in many of his other schools. The per pupil costs of the city’s underenrolled schools are “extremely high,” Ramos noted – in some cases, more than double what it costs per student in other Newark schools. Malcolm X Shabazz High School, for instance, is half empty and costs more than $33,000 per pupil to run, state data shows.

Some schools in the East ward, on the other hand, have double the number of kids that they’re supposed to. “Every public school in the East Ward continues to be overcrowded,” East Ward Councilman Michael Silva told us, calling it “morally reprehensible” that the area hasn’t been prioritized. “When we couple this with the shortage in several teaching areas (math, science, ESL) I have been told of some cases of 40 students in a classroom!” he wrote.

Schools are overcrowded in pockets of the North ward, too. But the district seems more focused on fighting for buildings in the wards where there are the most charter schools.

The district wastes money in smaller ways as well. It has sent staffers and school board members to a host of sunny places like Palm Springs, Orlando, Puerto Rico, Last Vegas, San Diego, New Orleans and Honolulu for conferences. It also sought to spend more than $4 million to create a museum, while a majority of Newark third graders can’t read – and while its recovery from the pandemic is among the worst in the state, trailing other low-income cities like Camden, Elizabeth and Jersey City, and across the river, Philadelphia.

“The district has not recovered from the impact of COVID yet, while other districts around the state and the country are making substantial progress,” Ramos noted. “We still have a long way to go, so every dollar’s precious. And how you decide to invest those resources matters.”

Do children benefit when the state spends millions to block a successful charter school, while other schools and districts are desperately waiting years for decent buildings? No. That’s about politics, not kids. And it’s a waste for state taxpayers, too.

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