The state-funded program's education and service components are meant to help disengaged young people get jobs
NEWARK -- A dozen young people sit around a table inside a city community center, wearing matching baby-blue T-shirts and talking about nutrition.
An instructor asks someone to share what he ate over the past few days -- the homework assignment for this group of 16- to 24-year-olds who are out of school and unemployed.
Through the Newark Street Academy, an educational and job training program, Mayor Ras Baraka hopes to change that description.
He joined program administrators at the Vincent Lombardi Community Center on Tuesday to announce the state grant-funded academy's launch of four annual 12-week sessions, each of which will target 15 people who have not succeeded in a traditional academic environment.
Students are paid slightly higher than minimum wage to participate in small-group classroom instruction each morning. Outreach workers mentor the students and help them complete assignments.
In the afternoons, students participate in service projects or internships meant to enable them to use their classroom learning to contribute to their communities and develop leadership skills.
About 4,000 young people in Newark are not in school or employed, Baraka said. He hopes he can eventually expand the program to include more of them.
For now, Newark Street Academy uses recruiters to spread the word about the program and encourage young people to apply. The academy also utilizes connections with the judicial system to identify people who might be good fits.
Similar "street academies" operated in cities like New York and Chicago in the 1960s, Baraka said, but Newark is trying to breathe new life into the concept.
The first step is changing the way the students think, said Margaret Stevens, a history teacher. She said they've been told they're failures who dropped out of school of their own fault.
"The first thing we had to do in this program intellectually is tap into that part of them that understood somehow instinctively that it was the school system that had failed them and that it was the world that they were born into that had failed them," Stevens said. "They didn't choose to be born into a world where guns and drugs and every type of negative vice was an option."
Once they remember that, she said, not only can they get their GEDs, but they can also learn to think critically about the world and how they can help improve it.
Baraka said he knows this program won't correct the city's educational deficiencies overnight, but it's part of a broader push to turn around a trend of the system failing Newark's kids.
"If a train is coming in your way, the first thing you have to do is slow it down," he said. "You slow it down, then you stop it. Then after you stop it, you have to reverse it."
"You can't turn it around while it's still moving in your direction."
Marisa Iati may be reached at miati@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Marisa_Iati. Find NJ.com on Facebook.