(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone.

Steve Adubato with kickoff the program, talking about urban education that apparently is working.

We're joined by Marcelino Trillo, the principal of Robert Treat Academy, one of the first charter schools in the state of New Jersey and in the nation.

Good to see you Marcelino.

- Great to see you too, Steve.

Thanks for having me.

- Let me, all right, what am I gonna disclose right now?

What am I gonna disclose?

What should I disclose about the Robert Treat Academy and how it happened?

- Well, obviously you have ties to the academy through your father in the North Ward Center.

Of course, your father being the founder, and still very much the reason, you know, for what we do here and how we do it, especially.

So besides that, and that your sister was my former boss, and that your other sister, I still work with at the North Ward Center.

I don't know what else you got in there.

- No, but I, just to be really clear, it's not only a full disclosure thing, it's putting things in perspective.

My dad, you know, Steve Adubato Sr. died many years ago, a struggling school teacher in Newark and then started the North Ward Center.

But along the way he said, "Hey, why can't urban kids have a better education, have more options?"

And that's exactly what the Robert Treat Academy is about.

So, along those lines, Marcelino, as we put up the website, describe what the academy is, what grades there are, and why it's doing well.

- So the academy, like I mentioned before, is one of the, it's actually the first charter school that opened.

- Yes.

- That was one of your father's big things.

He wanted be first, first through the door.

- That's right.

- So we were number one and we'll always be number one as far as schools that open, charter schools that open in New Jersey.

We're a K to 8 school.

We're on two campuses now.

One in the North Ward, the main campus named after your father, the Stephen Adubato Campus, and one in the Central Ward, just off the St. Benedict's Campus, the Jackie Robinson Campus.

There's about 450 students here and about 225 students at the Jackie Robinson Campus.

Hopefully to expand in the relatively near future to be the same size as here.

And why we work, Steve, listen, there's no, there's no mystery.

We've been asked, we, you know, people have been around, we ask for donors, people come to visit, see what we do, our best practices.

There's no secrets.

So school is a simple idea.

Give kids opportunities, have good conversations with parents, be honest with people, and treat kids like you treat your own kids and raise 'em to be the best they can be.

That's about it.

- But the standards are so high at the Robert Treat Academy, and again, it is incredibly challenging.

This Urban Education series we're doing tries to look at different things that appear to be working in urban schools.

But one of the things I know about Robert Treat, only because connected to my family and I've been around it for a long time, is that the preparation for that students get for standardized tests and just frankly doing well is intense.

Describe that preparation.

- Yeah, we take it very seriously.

And, you know, there's always accusations, or not accusations, misunderstandings, I guess, about, you know, preparing for a test instead of preparing for life.

And, you know, we take it from the side that in everything you're gonna do in life, you're gonna have to take a test, right?

You're gonna be a lawyer, you're gonna have to do well on the LSATs and pass the bar.

You're gonna be a Doctor, MCATs, and whatever other tests you have to take.

To be a fireman, you gotta take a civil service test.

So we take it very seriously in terms of how we test prep for the students.

We don't take away from the regular curriculum much, but we do have an 11-month school year, which gives us an extra month to get more education into them.

And then from Columbus Day weekend till about state testing, we have Saturday classes for three hours a day for third through eighth graders, where we focus specifically on test prep for math and English.

- Now that's Indigenous People's Day, I believe, you meant.

You said- - Whatever your preference is.

- I got it, I got it.

Especially coming from the neighborhood we come from, sometimes some of our friends are confused.

That being said, let me try.

Let's talk about literacy.

And please check out our website, SteveAdubato.org will come up.

We did a compelling interview with State Senator Teresa Ruiz, who knows the Robert Treat Academy.

Well, she's a former chair of the Senate Education Committee in the state.

We talked about literacy.

Principal Trillo, talk about literacy rates at the academy and why that is directly connected to success in life.

- You can't do anything until you read well, right?

So even the math and even science, social studies, there's any topic you wanna talk about, everything stems from reading.

And I'm a middle, I'm a former middle school math teacher, right?

Math is more of my passion than than ELA.

And there's always been a lot of nice conflict and joking around between the ELA departments and everything else.

But until a kid can read, the rest of the world is kind of closed off to 'em.

Once they can read, the whole world opens up to them.

So we focus a lot K1 and 2, kindergarten versus second grade, especially on every possible intervention that we can to make sure a kid is reading on grade level by third grade.

That's really kind of the benchmark.

If a kid gets to third grade and they're behind, listen, we keep kids back, we'll add more services.

We'll do what we have to do to make sure that kid starts at least third grade where they need to be.

And we find- - That ELL stands for English Language Learner, correct?

- Yes, sir.

- I cut you off.

Go ahead.

Finish your point.

- I said, so if a child, you know, isn't where they need to be by third grade, it really hinders the prospects for a successful academic future.

So we make sure that by third grade, they're ready to go.

- Marcelino, the impact of COVID, not just on test scores, but more importantly, overall on learning in, at Robert Treat, and the larger question of learning in an urban school community, excuse me, in an urban school.

- I think it's been underestimated still.

I think it's been more impactful in the inner city than it has in the suburbs.

And I think that's reflected on what we're seeing on state test scores.

I think math has been more adversely affected than English, language, arts, reading.

- Why do you think that is?

- Well, 'cause I think, like I said before, once you can read, right, those kids didn't anything because they could still read.

They didn't forget how to read.

But math, if you're not doing it, you know, every other day or every other month, you lose math.

Because I'm sure maybe your long division might be a little rusty.

Steve, I don't know.

Maybe you're still good at it.

- Don't push me on that, just 'cause I'm older than you.

- I just asked.

- It's not relevant.

Go ahead.

- But if it's not fresh, you know, math, science, social studies tends to go by the wayside a little more.

- Right.

Do this...

I'm curious about this.

One of the things in preparation for the program is I knew that my dad years back, he would take the kids, and he was into this.

I mean, he was a hands-on leader.

You know where I'm going with the sailing, right?

- I think so.

- What's up with, he would take kids sailing.

There's an annual sailing trip, a skiing excursion.

For Newark kids, what is it and why does it matter?

- Yeah.

Listen, the children need to be exposed, right, to the old world.

Newark, yes, it's a very culturally vibrant city.

There's a lot of great things going on in the City of Newark, but a lot of times for our students, it's a very small world.

You know, they're two or three block radiuses- - A lot of concrete.

- Is where they live their whole life.

- A lot of concrete.

- Yeah.

And that's all they know.

We've seen, one of my favorite stories that I tell is when I first started teaching, I had a student from the Central Ward, never been to the beach before.

So he went to the beach on a class trip, and he stared at the ocean, had to be for 10 minutes, just staring, and going, "It doesn't end."

And I said, "No, no, Khalil, this is the ocean, this is what it looks like."

But just to know that there's a whole world outside of, you know, they're perceived four walls here in Newark, that there's a whole world out there, that they're not stuck here, that there's somewhere to be.

And if you want it to be here, great.

But you could do whatever you wanna do anywhere you wanna do it.

- P.S., I know parental involvement is huge in this equation.

Marcelino Trillo, principal of the Robert Treat Academy, the first charter school found in the state of New Jersey, one of the first in the country.

And this is part of our series, "Urban Education That Works."

Principal Trillo, A+.

Job well done.

My father would not have given you an A 'cause he didn't give out A, you know?

- He doesn't give A's.

Yeah.

- You wouldn't have gotten an A either.

I know.

- Trust me, I never did either.

Thank you my friend.

- Thanks Steve.

- See you soon, all the best.

- All right.

- Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Celebrating 30 years in public broadcasting.

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