Mayor Baraka held a press conference today to announce the opening of Enrollment Assistance sites to help families register their children for school in the coming school year.
The Enrollment Assistance Centers will be located at sites around the City and be staffed by volunteers and staff from the Newark Public Schools to ensure the efficient flow of information to residents, families, and parents. The Office of Comprehensive Community Education in the Mayor’s Office will oversee the initiative, which will operate from August 27th through September 10th, from 4pm. to 8pm.
In addition, the Mayor will also discuss local control of the Newark Public Schools, the Newark Educational Success Board, and his vision of education in Newark after local control is returned. He noted that Community Schools have been especially successful across the country and that is the direction that the City want to go once local control is returned. In Tulsa, Community School students outperform non-community school students by 32 points in math and 19 points in reading. In Cincinnati, Community Schools went from an 84% dropout rate to a 100% graduation rate from 2000 to 2009.
I asked Mayor Baraka if the Newark Public School District agreed to help spread the word about the Enrollment Assistance Sites. He said, “I would hope so. They haven’t made a formal commitment to us that they would advertise it, but we’re going to do that anyway. I would imagine that if they’re committing resources to this that they would tell people that these Enrollment Assistance Sites exist as well. I think this helps the district. This is not just us saying that the One Newark plan is broken, this also helps the district with all of the troubleshooting that they have to deal with. Ultimately, we have to remember that none of this would be taking place if One Newark didn’t exist.”
