In acknowledgment of her pioneering work improving education and educational opportunities for underprivileged populations in Camden, NJ, Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, PhD, Founder and Chairman of the LEAP (Leadership, Education, and Partnership) Academy in Camden, NJ, received this year’s Ivy Young Willis & Martha Willis Dale Award, presented during a May 3 ceremony at the Mansion.
Presented annually, the award honors a woman who has made a noteworthy contribution to the civic life of her community: local, regional, national, or international.
In 1993, Bonilla-Santiago and the Rutgers Center for Strategic Urban Community Leadership developed the concept of an independently governed public charter school that could improve education and opportunities for the children and families of Camden.
Based on this concept, Bonilla-Santiago founded LEAP Academy in 1997, creating a system in which the entire community has a vested interest in student success.
“It’s not just a school,” she said. “It’s a community development effort.”
What started with five trailers on the Camden waterfront today offers its 1,500 students a “cradle-‘til-college” education in five modern buildings in downtown Camden.
“I started in trailers because I couldn’t get a building,” said Bonilla-Santiago, who ultimately bargained, successfully requested debt be forgiven, and even utilized Rutgers’ triple bond rating status to buy buildings and clean up Cooper Street in Camden, forging the LEAP campus.
“If you want to transform public schools and education, you have to build new buildings or repurpose old buildings,” she said. “We have to set the conditions.”
Bonilla-Santiago manages nearly every aspect of the school and education—a pipeline to higher education institutions that begins in infancy—and has implemented solutions to many potential educational obstructions. LEAP has a chef and a health clinic on site.
“Why is this work so important? We needed to create new daily rituals for children: uniforms, making sure that they have three meals a day, health care—simple, basic things. These kids have none of that, and if they don’t have a good meal, they can’t read, they can’t study, they can’t develop. That’s why we started the infant program. College begins in infancy.”
Rutgers, where Bonilla-Santiago is a Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor in the graduate department of Public Policy and Administration, serves as an anchor for the effort. Bonilla-Santiago even established a scholarship via an endowed gift at Rutgers, guaranteeing that every child enrolled in LEAP’s kindergarten has money to attend the college when he or she graduates.
Parents’ engagement serves a critical role in the LEAP system, but Bonilla-Santiago has also found teachers who are also vested. She said LEAP has had great results with a pay-for-performance system with teachers. “We really value teachers, but we have to hold them accountable,” said Bonilla-Santiago. “If they know the subject area, and they can teach, they deserve to get paid.”
It’s a bold new system that Bonilla-Santiago has forged, but she’s getting results. In a clip about LEAP and Bonilla-Santiago on reason.tv, producer and narrator Jim Epstein said, “LEAP stands out among Camden’s public schools, which are among the worst in the nation. In 2014, only 61 percent of Camden high school students graduated on time. At LEAP, the graduation rate was 98 percent, and every student who made it through also got into college.”
“What we’ve found works is when you take away all the bureaucracy, and direct funding to the teachers, to the schools, and you let them make decisions, let them work,” said Bonilla-Santiago.
At LEAP, the students and their achievements come first. “We do what it takes to do the job,” said Bonilla-Santiago. “We’re creating a new culture that is positive and loving. Love drives our work. In our pipeline, every kid is going to college, because it’s the way out of poverty. You break poverty one kid at a time. Every kid who graduates, gets a job, it will change their life forever.
“My work is about children, and children need advocates. If you care about children and want to save them, I want to work with you.”