The first day of school for Newark Public Schools is September 8, the day after Labor Day. There will be a number of changes in the district — one especially big change for students.
“This will be the first school year New Jersey districts will implement the phone-free schools law,” said Jessie Gomez, reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, an education website. “Basically every school district has to develop some sort of rule to ban cell phones, what the state calls a bell to bell ban.”
In June, the Newark school board approved the purchase of Yondr pouches, used to lock up students’ phones. Students will be allowed to carry their phones if they remain off and in the pouches. The district tried out the new policy this spring. It worked for the most part, but some students had figured out how to unlock the pouches.
The new school year in New Jersey will likely begin without the release of state test scores from the spring. The results won’t come out until some time this fall.
In the spring the state rolled out an updated online test that adjusted question difficulty in real time based on how a student was performing.
“What’s really interesting about this is that usually by this time, the end of August, school districts already have those state test scores, but because this is a new test, a new process, the state school board has to approve new cut scores, or new benchmarks,” said Gomez.
That means in Newark, where only 34% of third- to ninth-graders passed the English language arts tests last year, schools will start the year without a clear picture of where students stand.
Another issue confronting the district is the state of its old school buildings. In the East Ward alone, schools are on average a century old. This year’s budget includes an extra $12 million for maintenance work. But sometimes maintenance is not enough.
“Two really big pending things this year,” said Gomez, “One, Newark Public Schools is considering I believe it’s a three-decade, almost $500 million dollar lease to open a new school in the East Ward of Newark, and then two, the Schools Development Authority has promised Newark a new University High School.”
But plans to demolish the old University High and build the new building are still a ways off, Gomez said, with no progress on the construction expected this school year and possibly for longer.