Nov. 12. 2009
Dr. Charles T. Epps
Jersey City Board of Education
346 Claremont Ave.
Jersey City, NJ 07305
Dear Dr. Epps,
We would like to thank you for participating in our community meeting on Thursday Oct. 22, 2009. We were very pleased to see that high school principals and a few district administrators were present at the meeting to hear parents and help address our concern regarding challenges our high schools are facing.
About 120 parents and members of the community attended the meeting. We are happy that there was a spirited and open dialogue among parents, our communities and our schools. We firmly believe we can build great schools for our children only through real partnership and mutual respect.
Despite the good discussion at the meeting, our concerns about our high schools failing our children continue to exist. Unfortunately, we heard no specific plan of action, goals, timelines, and milestones offered by you or any other district and school administrators. We are greatly concerned that summer schools and after school classes are not being offered to our students. We very well understand that these programs have problems. But, they have to be fixed not nixed.
We count on your commitment that intensive after school academic advising will be available to students in our high schools and that no children will be denied free SAT test prep. We are also pleased that you made a commitment that within three years all high school students will have Individualized Student Academic Portfolio (ISAP). These are steps in the right direction, but they are far from enough. Much more has to be done to go beyond the status quo.
We insist that our district take bold actions to significantly improve our high school education. This requires an ambitious vision and high standards on the part of our school district leadership, and openness to work with parents and the community. It is wrong to compare and contrast two failing school districts, Jersey City and Camden, to each other. This approach will limit our vision and hamper our schools' ability to grow and improve. All children deserve the best education they can get. We invite you to carefully read and examine PCUE proposals included with this letter.
Below you will find some immediate actions we are seeking. We believe they will improve student performance, the graduate rate, and parent engagement.
(1) A Tutoring center, with after school hours, in each high school so that it can assist students, who are falling though the cracks, to catch up and move forward.
(2) We want Guidance Counselors to have a more intensive face to face quarterly meeting with students during accessible, after school hours. Such support can help our students to have individualized learning plan, develop goals, stay on track, and prepare for college or seek other meaningful career.
(3) We are asking for scholarship fund specifically to assist undocumented immigrant children planning to go to college. Far too many of our Latino and other recent immigrant students cannot go to college because they cannot afford to pay two or three times more in tuition fee than their classmates.
(4) We want our school district to truly listen to us as parents and allow us to annually evaluate our children’s school. We want them to include our evaluation in any efforts to improve our high schools.
(5) We want an annual one-page school report card that shows us how our high schools are doing in educating our children.
(6) Finally, we want all communication to be in the languages spoken at home by parents. Jersey City’s public school children come from homes where dozens of languages are spoken. Unless the School District makes a serious effort to get the information to parents in languages they can understand, the chances for parent support are greatly weakened.
We are also including written questions given to us by the some members of the audience at the community meeting. We are hoping that you will address their concerns.
We are commited to continue our "Graduation for All Campaign" to mobilize parents and our communities across the city to build a powerfull voice for our children. We hope you will do the right thing, use the power invested in you as the Superintendent of our school district, to end educational policies and practices that underseve our urban youth and make sure that they are getting the education that will prepare them for a better and bright future.
Sincerely,
Loyda Goldston
PCUE Vice-president
cc: Board of Education Members
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