Newark education system is experiencing something experts didn’t expect after pandemic

Alexus Sergeon and David Fils-Aime had just dropped off their twins, Aaron and Armani, at THRIVE Academy when they paused to explain how marketing had swayed them to move the boys into the charter school for kindergarten this fall after pre-K at a traditional public school for the 2024-25 academic year.

“I would say from the ads I liked how they were very interactive with the students,” said Fils-Aime, who grew up in neighboring Elizabeth, where he attended parochial and traditional public, or district, schools. “They showed how the principal had a good relationship with the students whenever they had events in the auditorium. It was things of that nature and the activity they engage in.”“And everybody’s really nice,” Sergeon said, her words echoed by Fils-Aime.

THRIVE, like most charters, doesn’t offer a pre-Kindergarten program, so there’s no telling whether the couple would have kept their sons at the school had the boys spent their pre-K year there.

In any case, Fils-Aime and Sergeon are among families in the state’s largest city who have continued to enroll their young children in charter schools in steadily increasing numbers, despite competition for students and their per-pupil aid dollars from the Newark Public Schools district.

For example, for the 2025-26 school year, the online enrollment platform solely for charter schools, known as the Newark Common App, received the highest number of applications to date since its creation three years ago, with 3,454, up 11.7% from 2024-25.