“In our education system they are the invisible population,” says Robert Clark, Executive Director of the Newark Opportunity Youth Network, referring to the more than 100,000 young people in New Jersey, ages 16-21, who are not in school, unemployed, and mired in poverty. In Newark alone there are 7,500 “opportunity youth” whose prospects for a successful adulthood are slim because the traditional educational system fails to successfully serve them.

This is where LEAD Charter School comes in, which was first granted its charter in 2016 and was recently awarded a five-year extension.   

Clark’s mission is to not only shine a light on those who are unseen but also create a statewide portfolio of schools that supports opportunity youth while they finish school, explore college and career options, and find success, an alternative set of programs that serves as a kind of high school intervention for young people who have fallen through the cracks. “Poverty is not a condition that dooms an individual,” he explained in an interview, “but it is a barrier. This barrier needs to be addressed in an intentional way. If you empower young people to support themselves, they’ll do so.”

This is one of the reasons why Clark founded LEAD Charter School, an alternative public high school in Newark that is an arm of Newark Opportunity Youth Network (NOYN). NOYN is a branch of an international organization called YouthBuild that helps disengaged young people reclaim their education; Clark himself is a graduate of YouthBuild in Boston, the first alumnus to found a new branch in a major city. As such, he says, “this is deeply personal to me.”

What does LEAD do that other public schools, traditional or charter, don’t do? How does it maintain its high graduation rate and low recidivism rate? 

According to Clark, LEAD creates an “environment of care,” builds the “conditions of learning,” and empowers students to rejuvenate their academic and career prospects. Yes, they come from tough backgrounds— he emphasizes that many of the 100,000 opportunity youth in New Jersey are not Black and Brown city-dwellers but low-income white rural young people—but that shouldn’t be an obstacle to the Constitutionally-promised “thorough and efficient” education. 

How does LEAD create these learning conditions?

One at a time.

Each one of the 280 students at LEAD Charter School has an Individualized Development Plan, or IDP, that is created during a mandatory orientation called “Mental Toughness,”  a kind of boot camp that includes evaluations with social workers, diagnostic academic assessments, and an introduction to the culture of the school. “It’s unwise to take a young person who is disconnected and hand them a schedule,” Clark explains. “We first need to introduce language and structures to build a strong culture so they can support each other and themselves.”  For example, some subsets of students are working or have children. “A cookie-cutter approach isn’t going to work,” Clark says. “Do I say you have to quit your job or not take care of your child?” Instead, the student and LEAD staff members work those responsibilities into a customized IDP that will list short-term goals, academic assessments, and accommodations. The goal for students is to build the muscles of leadership: first they are leaders of themselves, then their families, and then their communities. According to the state Department of Education, 73% of LEAD students achieve their goals.

(New data from Raj Chetty validates LEAD’s theory of disrupting generational poverty: When employment among poor parents of children in a community improves, those children are better off economically as adults. When the employment of parents worsens, their children’s earning power deteriorates too.)

NOYN has also been hard at work at the State House advocating for legislation that expands programs for disconnected youth. Just in the past year the New Jersey State Legislature passed two bills supported by NOYN that Gov. Phil Murphy signed: One establishes state grant funding to YouthBuild, which previously relied on only federal funds; “we want to raise the profile of these young people and inspire the creation of other programs through LEAD,” Clark says.  Another bill signed in January 2024 establishes the position of  the Youth Disconnection Prevention and Recovery Ombudsperson (YDPRO) in the Department of Education and the School Disconnection Prevention Task Force. 

To Clark, expanding alternative programs is an essential component of educational equity. “These are extremely talented and capable youth facing uphill battles,” he says. “They should have access to pathways to higher education and employment. If you empower young people to support themselves, they’ll do so.” 

If LEAD Charter School’s approach to serving disconnected youth is a test-case, Clark has proven his point.