The students at Barringer High School, part of the Newark Public Schools District, need help. Nine out of ten students can’t read on grade level and the state redacts math scores because they’re so low. Thirty-three percent of students are chronically absent.

Hands In 4 Youth to the rescue!

Hands in 4 Youth (HI4Y) has been around a long time—about a century—-and has served 100,000 students since its inception. With a 230-acre wooded campus in West Milford (Passaic County) right in the midst of Norvin Green State Forest, Executive Director Lee Bell told me, inner-city students like those who attend Barringer High are able to connect with nature and engage in real-world learning. 

In 2021, right after COVID school closures had disrupted the lives of Barringer’s 1,800 students, the school’s principal, Dr. Jose Aviles, reached out to Bell and was able to secure district funding because he  knew something had to change: after all, Barringer’s high school graduation rate in 2018 was a rock-bottom 51%.

“There were so many problems getting students reestablished in school,” Bell explained, noting the changes in family dynamics during the pandemic and the surge in mental health issues. “We knew we could help.” Being out in the wilderness, he says, hyper-charges social-emotional learning, fosters exploration, and promotes bonds and team-building. The campus includes a challenge course and a 60-acre lake. “Some kids thrive in the classroom but some don’t,” he said. Barringer students “have shown different leadership skills outdoors. We explore goal-setting and create benchmark hurdles so they can visualize what will be on the road ahead of them. We dive into career exploration and do a lot of drop-out prevention programming.””

When you “keep kids off the street and connected with agencies like ours,” Bell continued, “opportunities arise. When children see diversity, they see opportunity, they can picture themselves somewhere else. It’s very hard to know where you’re going if you can’t see it. We help them make their own world bigger.”

He added that one of the program’s rules is “no screens.” If students can’t use their phones, he says, they get a “respite” from technology. “They are forced to communicate, an old skill-set that people have forgotten to use. They start to reconnect with each other in an authentic way.”

Indeed, HI4Y offers a number of programs appropriate for high schoolers. There’s the Big Blue Dropout Prevention Program, where 25 Barringer students spend a full day in the woods every two weeks. (Bell: “There’s  value to a full day of nutritional meals.”) The program also offers a Leaders in Training program, for older teens (ages 16-18), which helps students navigate the transition out of high school. HI4Y even takes them on college tours and trips to landmarks in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. 

How is it going at Barringer? 

In 2023 the graduation rate was up to 77%, a big jump from the 2018 rate 0f 51%, and the drop-out rate is way down. Meanwhile, HI4Y is expanding in Newark; last week it started offering an afterschool enrichment program at Great Oaks Charter School.

Let’s go Big Blue!