During a year at Camden High, I learned hard lessons about the role of politics in state takeovers

I spent the 2014-15 school year documenting life at Camden High School as a photojournalist to see how the famed “Castle on the Hill” was faring after the state took over the school system a year earlier.

I witnessed pat downs because of a broken metal detector; classrooms that were freezing in January and sweltering in June; few textbooks and extracurricular activities; hallway brawls and the lethal lure of gangs. I came to understand the lifesaving potential of sports and met teachers and students determined to prevail in a daunting landscape.

I saw how poverty affects learning — how it skews test scores and provides a rationale for draconian policy decisions.

I also saw the huge role politics plays in the education of Camden children.

Eleven public schools have been shuttered since the takeover of the city’s schools in 2013; more than half of Camden students now attend charters or so-called Renaissance schools — publicly funded schools that are privately operated by nonprofit groups.

From the beginning, Camden’s charters used public funds to compete against traditional schools for enrollments. One moved into an elementary school and immediately installed air-conditioning — but only in the Renaissance school’s part of the building. Others offered incoming students brand-new, state-of-the-art laptops.

“They said it’s healthy competition and choice for people,” Davida Coe-Brockington, principal of Creative Arts High School, told me. “But how can you compete when you’re constantly trying to shut us down and take away resources?”

The takeover changed the school board from an elected to an appointed body — allowing the local Democratic machine, led by South Jersey political power broker George Norcross, to select members who would effectively rubber-stamp its agenda.

Then, after activists won a court-ordered referendum to regain residents’ right to vote for board members, a national charter school advocacy group pumped tens of thousands of dollars in donations into the city to support the election of board candidates who support privatization.

Some of the party’s choices proved catastrophic. Last year, board president Wasim Muhammad and the district settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by a woman who said he’d sexually assaulted her when he was her middle school teacher, and board member Clayton Gonzalez resigned after his arrest on gun charges.

Then-Gov. Chris Christie cited Camden’s low test scores and poor graduation rate to justify the takeover, which became synonymous with closing public schools and replacing them with charters.

That was by design. In 2011, Norcross called Camden’s public schools “juvenile prisons.” A secret New Jersey Department of Education proposal described a “Portfolio Management Plan” that called for doing away with as many as 10 public schools between 2011 and 2016. The blueprint advised lawmakers in Trenton to seize control of Camden’s school board by taking away members’ ability to cast binding votes and adding state-appointed members.

“How can you compete when you’re constantly trying to shut us down and take away resources?”

In 2012, the state legislature passed the Urban Hope Act, with Norcross’ brother, U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross — then a state senator — as its prime sponsor.

That year, the Camden school board green-lit the first Renaissance school after a contentious vote.

Although test scores began to trend upward, a 2021 report by the nonpartisan think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective concluded that recent improvements in students’ academic performance were the result of declining poverty rates in the city, not the takeover.

The report’s coauthor, Julia Sass Rubin, said many Camden students were not choosing to transfer from public schools to Renaissance-led charters. “They might leave their public school in June,” she told me, “and when they return in September, find that the building has become a Renaissance charter.”

Camden City School District Superintendent Katrina McCombs announced the closure of three elementary schools in 2021, saying a city with 6,000 students could not support 19 schools, and that conditions in the targeted schools were “deplorable.” Protesters said the schools were not beyond repair, and that closures would force parents to choose between traditional schools farther away or charters nearby.

In 2021, Camden public school activist Dava Salas cornered Gov. Phil Murphy at a campaign appearance.

“I asked Gov. Murphy to please tour these schools himself, and he said he would be coming down and he took my phone number,” she told me. He didn’t follow through.

“I called over 77 times,” said Salas. “Then I stopped counting.”

Her timing was terrible. After a three-year feud between Murphy and Norcross — ignited by a dispute over the state’s tax incentive program — the two men had made peace. Murphy did not save the doomed schools.

In July, George Norcross pleaded not guilty to a 13-count indictment charging him with public corruption, including racketeering and extortion.

But nothing will bring back the beloved schools the Norcross machine helped destroy.

April Saul, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a former photojournalist at The Inquirer who has spent much of her career documenting life in Camden.