Short of funds, alternative school in Camden cutting back

When Miguelina Rodriguez walks into an alternative school program at an East Camden church for the start of the semester Thursday, she will pick up books and return home.

No teachers will be there to help with a math equation, or classmates to study with.

The Community Education Resource Network (CERN) has shut its in-house alternative program at Bethel United Methodist Church for lack of funding. It will support home schooling, but even that is on the verge of extinction.

Townsend Press in Berlin has donated take-home material, but CERN founder Angel Cordero said the core of the program depends on students receiving face-to-face instruction. If he does not get money to pay teachers and other classroom material, he said, he will give up on the whole program.

"No one has stepped up to the plate to donate money," Cordero said. "If I don't get funds by September, I'm done."

He said he needed about $25,000 to run the full CERN dual program for a semester but could make it work with half that amount.

Just a year and a half ago, CERN was lauded by Gov. Christie, state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf, and Cooper University Hospital chairman and Democratic Party leader George E. Norcross III at the program's June 2011 graduation. Norcross is a part-owner of The Inquirer.

Though CERN is not a state-certified program, its certificate of completion has helped high school dropouts go to trade school or pursue job opportunities. Close to 3,000 people - ranging in age from 14 to 65 - have graduated from its in-house and home-school programs since 2007.

The in-house program, which Cordero had to shut in December at the end of the fall semester, was the more popular of the two and accounts for about 2,500 of the graduates.

Cordero recently incorporated CERN as a nonprofit and is applying to the IRS for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in the hope it will encourage donations.

"Funds never came in, partly because we didn't have a structure in place," Cordero said. Donations used to come through the church that houses the program.

In six months, the length of both programs, students are taught English, math, civics, reading, and writing. Many of the students who come to CERN have fourth-grade reading and writing levels.

"The kids coming in are so far behind, it would take so long" to get them to a GED degree, Cordero said. "We couldn't get the other ones in line coming in."

Cordero, a paid parent advocate for the school-choice group Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), said there is high demand for CERN from Camden high school dropouts and their parents. He doesn't turn away students; his largest graduating class was 400.

School violence is the main reason many high school-age students end up at CERN, Cordero said.

Rodriguez, 15, is one of those students. She, like her sisters - Brenda, 18, and Ashley, 19 - dropped out of high school because she was getting bullied and assaulted, both at Camden High and then at the alternative Camelot school she recently attended.

"I'm not putting my daughter through that again," said Rodriguez's mother, Glenda Martes.

Camden charter schools are at capacity enrollment for the year and couldn't take her daughter, Martes said. Plus, her two older daughters have succeeded since graduating from CERN. One is working as a housekeeper at Cooper and the other is studying and working at the Work Group, an alternative career-readiness program in Pennsauken.

"CERN was my only hope," Martes said.

The district has tried to address its school violence and dropout issues by contracting with an outside provider, Camelot, to run three alternative schools.

Camelot's Camden City Accelerated High School is having open enrollment through March 5 to fill about 50 open slots.

The Accelerated High School, designed for 200 students, is for "either dropouts who have returned to school or other over-age, under-credited students trying to turn their lives around," said Camelot spokesman Kirk Dorn.

CERN has filled the void, though, for people who can't stay in school for a year or two, Cordero said.

Even if they don't receive the equivalent of a high school diploma, CERN provides motivation to pursue a career, said recent graduate Yvonne Scott, 53.

"It made me go further," said Scott, who is in a medical assistant training program at Anthem Institute in Cherry Hill. "A lot of people in Camden need that . . . gives them encouragement."